From the Editor’s Desk

Welcome to Issue 12 of Mistake House Magazine.

Our name is a fond nod to Bernard Maybeck’s experimental structure on our Principia College campus, a small “house” that was built to test materials and architectural techniques for the College buildings. Mistake House Magazine channels Maybeck’s process by publishing writing and art that is experimental, explorative, and inventive.

You’ll find this spirit of exploration in many of the poems, stories, and photographs in this year’s issue. Nic Hinson’s short story “A Snail’s Tell-All Personal Account of the Incredible and Abundant Luxuries of Captive Living” follows a snail as it moves through states of freedom and captivity, while Milagros Muschella’s poem “third place” unfolds as a conversation between two speakers about absence, loss, and memory. In “did jesus have a comfort food?” Wyatt Vaughn recontextualizes and riffs on religious language and imagery. “That’s Entertainment,” a poem by Zack Carson, moves through music venues, crowded streets, loneliness, and exhaustion, his language searching for something that’s just out of reach.

The winners in each category of this year’s Editor’s Prize speak not only to our magazine’s tagline—“a space between ordinary and odd”—but also to concerns about identity and isolation. In “Mornings with the Canada Geese” by Sophie Cornwell, winner of the Editor’s Prize for Poetry, the speaker in the poem watches geese eating in the rain while reflecting on the passage of time, illness, and mortality. For its powerful composition and caring portrayal of Black life in East St. Louis, Lamiya Terrell’s photograph “Somewhere In Between” wins the Editor’s Prize for Photography. Nic Hinson’s “A Snail’s Tell-All Personal Account of the Incredible and Abundant Luxuries of Captive Living” wins the Editor’s Prize for Fiction.

We are honored to feature poet Saúl Hernández and artist Ronald Young in this year’s Soap Bubble Set. Raised near the border between Mexico and Texas by former undocumented parents, Hernández explores immigration, queer identity, and the tension between physical and mental borders in his poems; in his featured interview, he describes how poetic forms can liberate “inherited expectations around family, culture, or survival which don’t align with queer identity.” St. Louis-based artist Ron Young constructs his sculptural assemblages with found material from abandoned buildings in North St. Louis, reshaping them into forms inspired by African diasporic traditions, spirituality, and memory. Together, their work highlights how identity is never fixed but continually formed, carried, fractured, and rebuilt.

Issue 12 exists in motion. Between certainty and uncertainty, recovery and loss, rebuilding, and breaking. Throughout all the pieces here, you will encounter bodies in transition, language as negotiation, and lives shaped by the seen and unseen. We invite you to move through these moments, spend time with them, and notice what lingers—sitting with the tensions that resist resolution.

Welcome back to Mistake House. 

~ Zoe Houseman, Editor-in-Chief