disaster

Dear reader,

Our Fall Magazine, Fluidity, was a collection of questions, calmness, and tranquility, mixed with blue and purple hues. It conveyed a sense of being one with water and with the ebbs and flows of life. While our masthead took great pleasure in creating the magazine, we also stopped frequently in the face of adversity. Tension grew day by day. We looked around at one another in awe of this tension and thought: this is a disaster. And yet, we were having fun!

Thus, the Disaster Magazine was born! Messes, chaos, and evil (oh my!), mixed with laughter and spills that are quite comical and exhilarating when looked at from an opportunist’s lens, and we are undoubtedly grateful to each of our contributors for sharing this love of disasters and for helping us create this disaster of a publication.

Sprinkled throughout the pages of our Winter Magazine, you will find pieces from both familiar and new writers. With more poems, bright reds, and emotional explosions, prepare yourself for an unparalleled reading experience that will leave you literally dangling from the edge of your seat. The pages of this magazine cover topics that range from sex symbols, earthquakes, and junkyards, to self-induced cringe, hauntings, and panic at the passage of time. If you’re feeling too overwhelmed from all the chaos, we also bring you a poem from our Fluidity Magazine era to provide some relief in the midst of this mess.

Creating this disastrous magazine would not have been possible without the help of our Features Editor, Sam Rosati Martin, our Poetry Editor, Ishika Rishi, our Associate Features Editor, Eugene Kim, our Photo Editor, Kelsey Phung, and our Art Editor, Shelley Yao. We also want to extend a huge thank you to our Design team, Chloe Loung and Wendy Wan, who are responsible for the gorgeous (and not at all disastrous) design you’re looking at right now.

We hope the pages of the magazine help you view your disasters more empathetically, allow you to relish in the feeling of knowing everyone feels like a disaster sometimes, and put you at ease when you realize that we’re all just big hot messes in bundles of hay. Put your helmets on, we hear there’s a storm coming…

From our trainwreck to yours, Janna Abbas and Rion Levy features associate: Eugene Kim copy associate: Maeve Ellis associate art editor: Chelsey Wang design associate: Wendy Wan associate photo editor: Nicholas Tam illustration team: Shelley Yao, Chelsey Wang, Raquel Lwein, Natalie Song, Jennifer Fong Li, Sahrada Mujumdar, Callie Silverton, Faith Dong editorial assistants:

Romina Emtyazi, Sakura Armstrong design team: Chloe Loung, Wendy Wan, Janna Abbas, Rion Levy visual team: Nicholas Tam, Kelsey Ngan Phung, Anh Minh La, Tra Pham copy team: Rion Levy, Janna Abbas, Adam Lam, Sakura Armstrong, Max Lees, Kieran editors-in-chief: Janna Abbas, Rion Levy production manager: Janus Kwong features editor: Sam Rosati Martin poetry editor: Ishika Rishi senior copyeditor: Roensa Salija art editor: Shelley Yao photo editor: Kelsey Ngan Phung design editor: Chloe Loung

America's Sex Symbol is a Tortured Woman

Kalliopé Anvar McCall

A Ripple Through Life

Sakura Armstrong

Complex

Kelsey Ngan Phung

Petersburg

Gillian Chapman

Junkyard Circus

Max Lees

The Novena of Tio Mauro

Michael Mejia

Consequence

Ben Murphy

Halfheartedness

Kelsey Ngan Phung

It's Okay to Believe in Ghosts

Eugene Kim

Crashing

Romina Emtyazi

This is Not a Place of Honour

Kieran Guimond

To Find Myself

Kelsey Ngan Phung

Supersingle Blackout!

Anya Shen

Party Post-Mortem

Brooke Collins

The End of Time

Chelsea Wang

Pyrrhus Retires From War

Namah Jaggi

All Into One

Ella Spitzer-Stephan

The End.

Rachel Sugin

Seasick

Sydney Pacheco

There's a Baby Within the Beast

Kalliopé Anvar McCall