If we are all the dead conversing with the dead, I like to think the language we use to bridge the space between us is called music.

The Elegy Letters (A Selection)

My work as a writer is aimed at truth which, like a song, cannot be contained.

Songs for the Elegy Issue (A Selection)

A series of songs chosen by Issue X’s contributors, a mix to light up all that desperate quiet & sing the grief alive.

X: Elegy | Silver-Tipped Swallow: "Debt Collector's Lullaby"

When reporters ask for the secret, you are good at hedging: hard work is a sweet way to say obsession. Pathology is prettier when masked in music.

Columns, Literature, Music, Personal EssayTopaz WintersJuly 17, 2022silver-tipped swallow

“I find joy in singing my dead to life just as often as I find ache.” (Anthony Thomas Lombardi on Elegy)

Elegy can be messy. Elegy is sometimes unhappy with itself, too. Elegy is regrinding the lens again & again & again. Elegy is a reconstruction of joy.

"Grief does not exist only in subtraction." (Geoff Anderson on Elegy)

Elegy is birthed from such discomfort, a speaker navigating a world that hurts precisely because of its horrible resemblance to the one left behind.

Music, Literature, Personal EssayGuestJuly 10, 2022Søren Kierkegaard

"An elegy is a story bigger than despair." (An Interview with Maria Chiara Piglione)

The oval and circular shapes speak of an ancient world, a world where everything is whispered to life by its surrounding details.

"To mourn is also to acknowledge the limitations of language." (Gavin Yuan Gao on Elegy)

Elegy is the séance we hold as we pray for a visitation from the ones we have lost. We invite them to haunt us. We sing to them, and listen for song in return.

Literature, Music, Personal EssayGuestJune 29, 2022Gavin Yuan Gao