Tempered Magazine December 2013 // January 2014 // Issue 01 | Page 4

A WORD FROM
TEMPERED.
Tempered Magazine started as a selfish project.
It began, as many projects do, with an idle question: “What is everyone else up
to?” In the distraction-seeking throes of our own creative pursuits, we wondered
suddenly what our fellow Macalester grads were doing. We realized that when
you’re at Mac, living with your friends, on campus all the time, it’s easy to see that
the people around you are engaged in creativity. You go to plays and concerts; you
walk by prints and paintings displayed on the walls; you attend poetry slams and
take creative writing classes and you’re constantly amazed by the talent this place
attracts and produces.
And then you graduate, and it all goes silent.
We decided to turn the sound back on. We had a feeling that Mac grads--ones we
knew and ones we didn’t-- were still creating. In fact, we suspected they might even
be creating more and (dare we say it?) better. We saw a chance to reach through
time and space to connect with a broader creative community than we’d ever been a
part of. We just had to put out the call, and hope they’d find us—hope they’d believe
in our vision and share their creations.
Well, they definitely found us. We were blown away by the response to our call for
submissions for Tempered Magazine’s inaugural issue. On the pages that follow
you’ll find song, poetry, watercolor, flash fiction, monologue, photography and more
from Mac grads of all ages and living all over the world. These are artists both
established and aspiring, works ranging in size and scope from world-renowned
architectural sculpture to images taken with a digital camera and printed at CVS.
We asked, “What’s everyone up to?” We hope you enjoy this glimpse into the
answer from our Mac creative community—which, we discovered, doesn’t disappear
after graduation, but expands and enlarges. As we soak up all of the incredible art
we received and work to finalize this first edition, we’re already selfishly dreaming
of what will come our way for Tempered Magazine’s next issue.
-TM

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