Welcome to Issue 7: Unearth. We took a small step back this year by publishing this single issue. We spent the extra time to re-explore the publishing process as our team moves into a new era with more members than ever before. We opened submissions without a concept in mind, allowing the pieces that spoke to us to reveal this issue’s theme and title. Ultimately, after much heated debate and whiteboards scrawled with lists and graphs, we settled on “Unearth.”
We ask you: what do you consider “reality”? Is it the earth beneath your feet, a familiar town that smells of dust and nostalgia? Perhaps reality to you is breathing heavy August air, exhales tinged bittersweet by coffee and rain; or a taste of unripe citrus, a memory from youth slathered unsparingly on the tongue. But then, what is not “reality”? Is it a hedonistic dance of beings around a fire, not quite monster, not quite human? Is it a fish’s glazed, milky eyes, reflecting the silence between a mother and her child? It could be a question of all of these—uncanny fiction so real that it shatters a wall that should stay unbroken.
The line between reality and unreality, truth and untruth: this is where Unearth exists.
Unearth is less of a place than a journey: a needle and thread darting between realism and speculative, the surreal and grounded. This collection is an excavation site; it is a locus from which the mundane is defamiliarized, transcending into the otherworldly. We invite you to tread the line carefully, lest you fall into a reality or unreality irreconcilable with–or eerily similar to–your own.
This magazine would not have been possible without our outrageously talented team and featured artists as well as the wonderful literary community of UCSD. We once again received an unprecedented number of applications and submissions this year, and for that, we thank everyone who took the leap to show us a bit of who they are. We also thank you, dear reader, for picking up this copy of Unearth. Other People Magazine is almost five years old, and we are immensely honored to continue our mission of voicing what is not heard and showing what is not seen. Let this issue transport you to a mirror wonderland, a realm that warps the known and unknown. We’ll leave the looking-glass open for you to return–unless you’d prefer to stay just a little longer in that other world.
— Olivia Hwang, Sophie Mo, Princess Nunez
