One Throne Magazine – Spring 2014

Hailing from Dawson City, Yukon comes a brand new online quarterly, One Throne Magazine, publishing fiction, nonfiction, and writing. And while the visual element is what will initially draw you in, it’s the writing that will keep you there exploring.

Hailing from Dawson City, Yukon comes a brand new online quarterly, One Throne Magazine, publishing fiction, nonfiction, and writing. And while the visual element is what will initially draw you in, it’s the writing that will keep you there exploring.

Wyl Villacres, in his nonfiction piece, thinks about the “difference between what [we] need to do to stay alive and what to do to feel alive” while offering us insight about bike cabbing in Chicago. His collections of vignettes are entertaining, though at the same time reveal his need or want to move on in the midst of his reluctance to give up the excitement of the job. A lot of the legwork to draw in the metaphors is already done just from the imagery of biking, but it is how Villacres ties it in that makes it worth the read. For example, he explains that at night, it’s hard to fall asleep: “The constant state of motion that you were in all day, perpetually feeling the world go by under your wheels, works its way into you head, into your brain, and when you close your eyes, your whole body feels like it’s going forward.”

Chris Cover’s fiction piece is an adrenaline rush, letting the main character drive you through the story at 75 mph up to 115 mph as he starts his 1,200 mile journey to return a car home. We ride shot-gun as he begins to lose it, writing on his arms, his hands, shoving blueberries into his mouth leaving a purple smear. The character in Xanthi Barker’s “The Unreflected,” too, has her own unhinging. The piece starts, “On the morning that I pulled the mirror down on my head and should have been knocked unconscious but instead remained awake to witness a thousand shattering shards of myself begin to eat into the naked skin of my stomach and legs, I thought, you know what, maybe it’s time I was leaving.”

While I’m not a fan of rhyming poetry, I did enjoy the way Eleanor Austin views the world as if we were giants: “When you scream, the heavens roar; / The whole world cries when giants weep.” And the art throughout the issue is awe-full, each piece enticing you to look closer. It’s not real clear where the art comes from (no submission info about artwork), but it certainly works in One Throne’s favor, pulling all the pieces and creating an atmosphere you won’t want to miss out on.
[www.onethrone.com]