From its inception Majuscule has been determinedly theme-free. The driving idea behind the journal was the solicitation and publication of good writing, and we wanted there to be as few barriers and as wide a scope as possible. We wanted to trust writers to follow their noses wherever they led, without trying to force an artificial constraint onto each issue. (To be completely honest, we also felt that putting together a literary journal from scratch three times a year would also be quite challenging enough without undue complications!) That said, there are issues that seem, almost by magic, to organize themselves around common considerations. It wasn’t until we were well into assembling Issue 11 that we noticed that all of the essays dealt, in some way or another, with women in media: women in song, in dance, in animation, in true-crime narratives; women resisting erasure or exclusion, women in the act of self-creation. Sometimes, it seems, a theme does not need to be planned.
Delia’s Gone
On the Trail of a Folk-Song Ghost
by Courtney E. Smith
On Tahia Carioca
The Belly Dancer Who Brought Samba to Egypt
by Mary Fawzy
New Magic to be Made
On the Lure of Animation
by Danielle Monique
Sold My Soul to True Crime
Ego, Ethics, and the Alleged Cruelty of Authors
by Peter Raffel
Featured Artist: Jiha Moon
A Conversation
by Amy Wilson
Vivian Onwujiogu
Sanders Isaac Bernstein
Jay Murphy