Momentary Magic i.e. Hearth & Heart

Getting to know Hearth & Heart

Hi, It's great to see you again.  I'm here with a friend and I'd really like to introduce you.

Reader, this is Hearth & Heart.  

Hearth & Heart, may I present Reader.  

I knew you two would hit it off.  I hope this will be the beginning of a long and lasting friendship.

About Hearth & Heart

Hearth & Heart is an illustrated quarterly collection of original short stories compiled into a half page zine format.  The stories are often seasonal, and are a blend of fiction and real life.

After writing Winter Tales in November of 2014, I wanted to publish more stories.  Winter Tales was a limited edition letterpress chapbook from Pegana Press, and it wasn't practical to continue to offer the works of an unknown story teller like myself in that same format.

I wanted to self publish and make the stories accessible to a wider audience so I decided upon presenting them as zines.

I published the first Hearth & Heart as Volume 1 2015 Summer Edition.  The stories are a blend of reminiscences, day dreams, and flights of fancy born from ordinary experiences.

For example:  this edition of Hearth & Heart begins with a story titled May Baskets and Spring Flowers.  Originally titled  A Story of May Baskets, it appeared as a blog post in Tea With Whimsy April 30, 2013 and was revised 2 years later to be included in Hearth & Heart.  I still can't decide which version I like better.  The original almost seems more intimate to me.  

Stories To Be Carried, Reading To The Faeries, and The Spider were all written within a two week period during the summer of 2014.  Stories To Be Carried came to me during a walk on a country road.  I made a special illustration for it which appears on the back cover.  Not great, but it was the first time I had drawn anything in about a decade, and I was delighted that it even resembled what I had in mind.  Reading To The Faeries came from actual observations made while in my back garden and appears as a micro story in a tiny book which you will find in a pocket on the last page of the zine.  The Spider is a story of perception and I think it would surprise most people.  It was told by observing the interaction between a fly and a spider.

A Conversation With The Moon came to me after spending the pre dawn hours communing with the full moon in November of 2014  I made a special illustration for this story by putting in a door that opens onto the story.  Under the illustration are a few lines (placed there as a caption) from a blog I used to write called Heal Earth Now.  Posted on  January 16, 2014, it goes like this...With my feet on the Earth, I stand in the silver light of your radiance, wrapped in wool against the cold night.  We watch one another.  And we tell each other stories...  It seemed appropriate under the circumstances.

I was so excited to finish my first zine that I immediately got the next edition ready.  Hearth & Heart Volume 1 2015 Autumn Edition was written, compiled, designed and had all the art work chosen, but the problem I kept running into was that I couldn't get any of the images to print clearly no matter where I went.  It looked like that edition was simply not meant to be...

Please join me here this Thursday as I continue to tell the story of the 2015 Autumn edition of Hearth & Heart.