Wisdom of the Art Goblin

When I was about 14 – while some of y’all were taking care of Tamagotchis and making zines because you’re cool, I was living in a slightly Heavenly Creatures fantasy world with my best friend at the time. We had a whole filled-out world devised around our favourite song.

We had character names (including alternate names for ourselves), plot lines, and soundtracks. We wrote notes to each other as our characters and kept them in a large folder with sketches of what our heroines and friends looked like.

Cream Scene has been a similar thing

….let me explain before the Heavenly Creatures vibe distresses you in an Infinity Land/Dahmer type of way…

In our first issue, we scrabbled, collected, cajoled, cried, and even while we were sleepy and excited, we were collecting more treasures for this issue.

For Our Next Trick. 

The Valentines Issue grew into a great big edition. We featured such varied pieces with FONT – it was a bigun. It didn’t start that way, but our number of submissions and creations snowballed. It kept rolling and collecting more splendour and glitter and werewolves, until we had to call a timeout. 

There were love letters to clowns and puppets, stilt walkers, carousel dresses, paper dolls, graffitied porn, punks, and dick, to mention a few things.

Dia is highly responsible for the fantastic content rounded up here. She looked to the ends of the earth, on missions to find the aforementioned paper dolls and stilt walkers in particular. However, even with this round-up, we did not expect the influx of spectacular things that came to us. We were giddy and giggly at the number of pieces from people in so many different parts of the world.

The stories, poems, and songs (Geraldine – thank you, Sky and Dia, for sharing her). We were so pleased to see the comics, paintings, photos, zines, collages, playlists, illustrations, and Valentine-themed attire.

We have been introduced to many artists and writers whose work has brought us genuine joy (or, in some cases – appropriate levels of discomfort).

I’ve been shown so much new art and read some seriously fantastic writing pieces – and I’m genuinely so pleased. 

Thank you for trusting us with your stories and art (and movie recommendations). Thank you for rallying around the Carnival, not just when we got hacked (we’re a carnival again instead of a pirate ship. It shapeshifts), but all the time. 

Your support of the magazine and your encouragement of each other has been a really beautiful thing to see. I’m so proud to be a part of this carnival/ pirate community.

 Hey, we’re Cream Scene Carnival; we are what we want.

Which, if I am trying to segue back to Heavenly Creatures, means we are something bizarre, extraordinary, pretty weird, full of love, obsession, joy, and fantasy. And maybe something that makes your mum a little uneasy. (Did I just make that way too weird, Dia? Please delete my murder references as needed.)

We are also pretty dang delighted to welcome the new Cream Scene Carnival team members who have hooked up to the Carnival during this issue. We literally couldn’t have done this without you all. 

Our community of weirdos is growing. It was a big ship with a small crew – but you pirate-sailor-carnival folk climbed aboard with all your creative abilities, and you helped For Our Next Trick be the exquisite beast it is. 

Please keep sharing your art with us. 

You get all the Valentines.

XO,

Katy