Literary Mixtape Volume 24
- kirstimackenzie
- Aug 31
- 4 min read
Side A:
"Days of the Phoenix" • AFI (by Natalye Childress)
Side B:
August 31, 2025
I'm writing to you from my overgrown backyard on one of the last summer days of the year. Where I live, in Northern Ontario, it's a bit colder by default. I miss Ottawa's humidity (and just about everything about Ottawa) but I am making the best of where I'm at, and that means writing in my lovely lush backyard where there are crab apples falling and squirrels playing and lawn mowers droning around me.
I've been spending a lot of time writing back here, lately. I can't overstate how big a deal this is. For a couple years my creative flow was blocked, or stunted, in the way it sometimes is when you're dealing with heavy stuff. We've all been there; I'm not unique. Spring was kind to me, and by summer I was ready to write again. Now it's like a faucet running at full blast. When I am writing I can't stop. When I am not writing I am thinking about writing. Creative flow is among the best natural highs life has to offer.
I don't say any of this to brag. Rather, I want you to know that if you are where I was—stuck, stunted, scared your creativity has abandoned you—it'll pass. Like everything. There will be ebbs and flows, always. Creativity is a bit like breathing; you have to inhale to be able to exhale. So if you are stuck, inhale as much as you can. Take in the work of others, let it inspire you. Absorbing and engaging with the work of others is still work. When it comes time to exhale your own stories, they'll be richer for all you've learned.
I guess what I am also trying to say is thank you. No matter how blocked I felt with my own work, I never stopped getting excited about what you shared in my inbox for M7, or what you shared on my timeline, or what you published with all our favourite presses. It keeps me grounded, and keeps me going. It's such a sincere pleasure to read someone's work and say Goddammit, that's good. Goddammit, I wish I could do anything that good. Goddammit, maybe one day I will.
Thank you also to those who tell me you read—and enjoy??—these navel-gazey little editor's letters. To those who say they want to write something specifically for the mag. It helps to hear, because I am forever labouring under the impression that nobody reads these. If you've connected with them, even a little, hello! I'm rooting for you always.
For your reading pleasure, Volume 24.
Music has a way of cementing memory at particularly formative ages, and it goes particularly hand-in-hand with teenaged experience, where everything is felt so keenly, so larger than life. Amy E. Casey's "San Dimas High School Football Rules" is a perfectly crystallized example of that particular kind of piece, and I never get sick of reading them.
I'm happy to have Mallory Smart as a repeat offender for M7. She's back with "The Joker", a new instalment in the many 'Dave' pieces that she's been publishing as of late. I don't know who Dave is fully, yet; Mal's revealing him to us in pieces, in flashes and impressions. What I do know is that the Dave series is some of her best work, and I'm very proud to be publishing this specific Dave story.
Natalye Childress' "Days of the Phoenix" is a memory of a place—and the crowds in it—that raise us during our wilderness years. There was something so incredible about dropping a street address, in that it relays a very specific place for the author, but also could be interchangeable and relatable to anyone. We've all had a 201 Washington Street, is what I'm saying. I bet you remember yours when you read this piece.
"Moon Song" is a brief meditation on death—its inevitability, and the tender time in childhood where we first feel mortality's sting. Ashley Kirkland is another repeat M7 contributor, and she's welcome back with a gut punch of an opening. This is an aside, but "Moon Song" was a song titled I was sure we'd pubbed before, but we hadn't!
James Croal Jackson's "True Solace" is a perfect little poem, beautiful in its simplicity and what echoes unsaid between lines. I am admittedly not a poet and don't pretend to understand the nuances of form and cadence, but I do know what I like when I see it and this one was an automatic yes for me.
Grant Ellsworth's "A Near Death Experience" is a wonder of a micro that touches on faith and whether celestial bodies are made of the same stuff we find on earth—oranges dripping with sunshine, an image so rich it stopped me mid-sentence. Finding heaven on earth is something I've thought a lot about lately, and this one captures the feeling better than I ever could.
Wherever this finds you, I hope you've had a hell (or a heaven!) of a summer. Mine was better than I could have hoped for, and maybe the best is yet to come. If you're on the fence about submitting, please take this as your formal invite, and encouragement—I'd love to see your little pieces, and grow the playlist as ever.
This is an aside, but I'll be reading in Chicago on Sept 6 at the Gallery Cabaret. Details are shared on Maudlin House/CLASH Books social media. See you there, if you'd like to come hang.
xo,
Kirsti