defunct – Spring 2012

This issue of Defunct, a nonfiction magazine, sparked a piece of my childhood—memories of Saturday mornings when my brother and I would litter the floor with Legos, watch Pokemon on T.V., and munch on bowls of Honey Nut Cherrios. Sonya Huber’s “Legoland” reminisced about the days when Lego characters all had the same face. “The little yellow faces,” she writes, “smiled a sort of inward parenthesis. They felt their feelings but the faces were all the same calm smile: man, woman, killer, child, seven heads stacked in a freakshow parade.” She compares these to the Legos that her son now plays with; each of the characters featuring the latest Indiana Jones or Harry Potter movie. As she says, “This is his Legoland now.”

This issue of Defunct, a nonfiction magazine, sparked a piece of my childhood—memories of Saturday mornings when my brother and I would litter the floor with Legos, watch Pokemon on T.V., and munch on bowls of Honey Nut Cherrios. Sonya Huber’s “Legoland” reminisced about the days when Lego characters all had the same face. “The little yellow faces,” she writes, “smiled a sort of inward parenthesis. They felt their feelings but the faces were all the same calm smile: man, woman, killer, child, seven heads stacked in a freakshow parade.” She compares these to the Legos that her son now plays with; each of the characters featuring the latest Indiana Jones or Harry Potter movie. As she says, “This is his Legoland now.”

Alejandro Ramirez also provokes memories in his piece “Pokémon Shuffle” which comments on the intensity that children used to have when it came to collecting the cards. After all, you gotta catch ‘em all. “I Was Young When I Left Home,” takes a different approach as, in a series of nine small sections, John Proctor reflects on his family and his life growing up, revealing a lot in such a short amount of space.

And there is plenty more where that came from as each author sets out to define his or her own meaning of “defunct.” This themed issue, “In With the Old (Haunts), Out With the New,” also features Ryan Van Meter, Lisa O’Neill, Fallon Kendall, Carole Firstman, Matthew C Easterwood, Richard Toon, Ruby Wallis, and Russell Scott Valentino and art from Margaret Kimball.
[www.defunctmag.com]