One Strange Day with As Alive Journal

Catch this stunning interview with As Alive Journal's EIC, Ashley Mina!

Jerome and the flock are thrilled to announce that we will be opening for submissions SOON, and this time it will be a joint effort with our friends at As Alive Journal! To get y'all excited for this issue and give you a little hint about what we're hoping to see, we sat down for a fun chat with Ashley about the theme and her writing habits.

Get to Know As Alive Journal with This or That

Day or Night

Night is when I’m most creatively productive. It’s also so quiet and peaceful, which makes for a good atmosphere too!

Daydream or Nightmare

Nightmares feel alive to me in ways that make me want to sit down and draw them up and out onto a page, and for that, they take the win. 

Crows or Vultures 

I have to admit, I love crows. There’s a mated pair of crows, Crowber and Longlegs, that I absolutely don’t give peanuts to (because that would be illegal). That said, every time I think of vultures, I think of this CryptoNaturalist poem, (https://x.com/CryptoNature/status/1375092972174381057?lang=en). 

Speculative or Literary

I know Speculative is the obvious answer, but I truly feel like stories are easier to fall into when the reader is already expecting to have to suspend their disbelief. I often find that literary fiction, for me, falls into this weird uncanny valley where I’m supposed to believe that the author’s world is the real world, but it doesn’t quite match up with the reality I see and hear. If that’s what the author was intending (The Truman Show), it could be great, but then it’s either actually genre fiction or it just leaves me vaguely unsettled in a way I don’t personally enjoy. 

Poetry or Prose

Tough, tough, choice, but I have to say, I love being able to sit with a prose piece and absorb it in stages, and that’s just easier for me to feel when I have a larger word count to look at and analyze. Don’t get me wrong, I love poems too, the shorter form is more conducive to visual storytelling by using formatting and rhyme schemes to help stick the words into your mind. Good storytelling opportunities to be had all around!

Sound or Silence

Silence is either the most peaceful thing in the world or the most terrifying. There’s no in between. 

Print or Digital

While I love the permanence and experience of flipping pages of a physical book, digital is more sustainable in the long term and affordable. I might be biased here, but I think there’s a great deal of culture to be gained from both consuming and creating art; however, unless it’s accessible to people, that culture might not reach broader communities.

Space or Sea

This is a tough one, but I gotta go with space, and I think there are two deciding factors here: the endless void and the fear of the unknown. When talking about endless voids, space is the one that’s still growing and expanding, whereas the sea can only grow so much, even if the tide swallows the world. And while we scientifically know more facts about space than our own ocean, the ocean is something that can be personally known. It can be touched and felt and smelled if you live near one, but only a select few have been outside our planet. There’s distance in either direction, but I think space feels more infinite. 

One Strange Day According to Ashley Mina

Like you, we had SO MANY questions for Ashley about how she defines One Strange Day, how she views speculative fiction, and what the submissions process looks like.

We were so enamored with your One Strange Day idea. What inspired this theme?

There’s something about circular structures that feels a little endless to me. In 2022, when I started thinking about making AAJ a reality, I had seriously considered making it a themed mag. In that alternate universe, One Strange Day was Issue #1, releasing with 24 submissions to make one complete 24-hour day. A far more literary but much less ambitious version of Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”. I couldn’t figure out how to logically make the submissions process work, though. Cue Snoozine offering us a collab that added that much-needed logic and structure to the idea to make it happen. So here we are, nearly 24 months later, for our first collaborative and first themed Issue. It’s a real full-circle moment for us, and we couldn’t be happier to celebrate it with Snoozine!

What does One Strange Day look like to you?

Murphey’s Law with a twist. This is a day where everything goes wrong, but maybe that’s for the best. Or maybe it’s not. One person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia, and I think that’d be a very fun idea to play around with.

On the topic of the Day/Night divide, how do you personally interpret that? Do you have an intrinsic association of day pieces with happier or fluffier pieces and night pieces with darker and more haunting pieces? Or do you view this as a simple time divide where terrible things can happen in the day and night can be a balm?

I think day and night are just two sides of the same coin.

In movies, bad things always happen in the dark. Visibility is low, so during nighttime you can play more thematically into the fear of the unknown, but almost ironically, I think there’s still a lot of darkness to be found in broad daylight. There’s a horror in knowing exactly what the monster/villain looks like and still being unable to stop them. There’s also Plato’s allegory of a cave, using light as a misdirection. I think daydreams can absolutely be about the horror of knowing and being known.

On the other hand, I think night can often be a time of comfort. Soft blankets, the deafening quiet, and really, who cares if there’s something under the bed holding your hand as long as you’re being held, right? (I care, I care deeply, in fact, I’m running away.)

Time is an illusion; make of it what you will before it makes something out of you.

One thing we really love about As Alive is that your team provides a constant supply of prompts for your writers. Will there be special prompts for One Strange Day?

Oh, absolutely! This is the first time we’ve had a theme, and we’re not passing up the chance to hype it up! Stay tuned for June!

This collaborative issue will be open to prose, poetry, and visual art. If you were personally going to submit to this issue, what would you submit? Would it be a Day or Night submission?

Hope you don’t mind my middle slider answer, but I love pieces that play with duality. I think if I was to submit, it’d be a piece centered around dawn or dusk that uses time as a visual metaphor for a character arc. A dawning realization or the sunset of a revelation. Something sticky and humid that feels like itching a mosquito bite until it bleeds.

Between both of our magazines, we broadly ask for fantasy, science fiction and horror, but are there specific subgenres you want to see more of? What about tropes or vibes you hope writers will hit in their submissions to One Strange Day?

Ashley: I feel like there’s a bit of a gothic horror revival happening in pop culture, and I’d love to see some more of it. While the gothic sub-genre is usually a mix of supernatural horror and romance, depending on the angle, it could see it leaning heavier into the whimsical and be a daydream, or go harder on the horror and be a nightmare. I think there are also some good opportunities here to twist in different kinds of love. A longing for self, for places, or communities, rather than traditional romances. 

Bri: I personally don't think we see enough of the hopeless ending in any of the genres, sometimes it's interesting to see what happens when the "good guys" don't always win, what complications arise from that? What happens to the world and the characters (don't kill them off though, that's cliche and uninteresting). I've also really been into the found footage trope, or digital media horror, or the endings leaving us with not knowing what the big bad is, just that it's there and it will get you, lol.

Tinamarie: One trope that I always enjoy is the "wishes gone wrong" scenario. Whether it's a genie, djinn, or demon at the crossroads... I'm referring to the classic Monkey's Paw storyline. I think having that wish interpreted in a twisted way can really reflect on the creativity of the writer. A chatacter fearful of the next wish but oh so tempted to try again.  You want to yell at the character to not make another wish because you fear for them. But you're also curious to see what terrible thing unfurls.

Evan: I'm always dying for more epistolary horror. Horror that plays with form to draw the reader further in. The more intimately close the piece, the better.

Kelly: I’m a big fan of unreliable narrators and really love tragedies.

One Strange Day submissions will be chosen based on which hours of the day they fall into. Do you have a favorite time of day?

Bri: My favorite time of day is night time! usually between 10 pm - 3 am!

Kelly: My favourite times are dawn and dusk (even though I’m rarely awake for the former)

Evan: Between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. There's peace and quiet, maybe a storm outside my window. I can get good work done right until I fully crash around 1:01 a.m.

Ashley: Waking up at 9 am without an alarm to the sound of gentle rain, knowing that there’s nothing to do and nowhere to be, is a true luxury. The alternative, of course, is 2 am when I go full goblin mode and decide to start an ambitious creative project for better or worse.

What advice do you have for writers hoping to submit to One Strange Day?

Be weird! Oftentimes, the pieces that stand out the most are those with concepts, twists, or genre bends we haven’t seen before, but suddenly, desperately, want more of! Don’t be afraid of odd hours either! Spec Fiction can happen at all hours of the day and night, so don’t be afraid of writing outside the stereotypical boxes. 

Here’s a fun scenario/question: The entire team at As Alive has been cursed and turned into mythical creatures. (Yikes!) What did each member become?

Ashley: Meliae, a mountain forest nymph. I love the outdoors, and sometimes knocking really is the best way to get my attention. Kelly: I feel like I’d turn into a jackalope, honestly.

What dream writer would you like to feature in One Strange Day? Pick anyone, dead or alive!

Ashley: Premee Mohamed. I’d love to see more stories themed like “The Annual Migration of Clouds” in our inbox.

Evan: Gennarose Nethercott (author of Thistlefoot) would make something spectacular for this theme. Her short story "Sundown at the Eternal Staircase" is one that I reread practically once a month.

Bri: Omg, featuring Ludmilla Ptreushevksya would be soooooo cool. She has a wicked scary fairy tale story collection that I'm obsessed with, and she is a phenomenal writer! The collection is called "there once lived a women who tries to kill her neighbors baby".

Kelly: Maybe this is too obvious but as a lover of horror, I think Edgar Allan Poe would have been a perfect fit for us.

Is there anything else you want our readers to know about One Strange Day?Aside from our eternal love for Jerome and the Snoozine flock? 

I think if you care about cool projects happening in the lit mag community, and you’ve taken the time to read through this interview (and our interview of Jessi!), then take this message as your personal invite to submit your weird and wonderful creations to One Strange Day! We’ll be opening submissions in late June, so keep your eyes open!

Submissions open soon!

Keep an eye out for our submission window to open. In the mean time, why not get started on a strange little piece to throw our way?