Feral Feline: "From the Vault"

Ummm hey. It's been a HOT minute since you've heard from us, hasn't it? Well, we are so happy to say that your friends at Feral Feline Literary Magazine are back, and we think it’s finally time to let the cat out of the bag— or should we say… vault?

A little over two years ago, the Feral Feline team was gearing up to start working on our third issue, “Whimsical Winter”. Although shortly after opening submissions for Issue 3, we kinda… fell off the social grid a bit. But, a month or two later we got back online, shared some updates, and announced that we would be doing our first “double issue”. We didn’t want to scrap all the work that came in during Issue 3’s submission period— it just didn’t feel right. Being creatives ourselves, we know well how intimate, vulnerable, or even scary it is to send your creative work to some strangers online to read and review, and maybe include it in their random magazine for all to see. So for us to just shrug and let all of our submitter’s hard work for Issue 3 get scooped into the litter box, felt pretty callous. 

The idea for a double issue came from the fact that spring was slowly approaching at the time, and it would feel weird to release a winter themed issue in the middle of spring. So along with still considering all the work received for “Whimsical Winter”, we put out a submission call for what would’ve been our fourth season themed collection, titled, “Sprouting Spring”, and was intended to be the second half of our proposed “double issue”, which we assumably would have released a month or so later.

However, we let ourselves fall out of the literary magazine world once again, and this time it felt like it’d be for good.

But life is unpredictable, you know? And cats kind of are too— and if you haven’t realized by now, those oh-so-cute-but-deeply-mischievous soft and silly little creatures are the heart of this magazine. The main focus of our publication is centered around embracing the “feral feminine”, after all— and us feral femmes here don’t quit.  

Okay, okay, we’ll get to the point now: what’s the deal with this “From the Vault” thing? 

Well, in short, all three of your Co-Editors-in-Chief at Feral Feline loooove Taylor Swift (fun fact: our shared love of TSwift is one of the main factors that brought us together as besties!). If you too are a Swiftie or even just a casual listener, then you probably know all about how over the past few years, Taylor has successfully re-recorded and re-released four of the six albums that were produced under her former record label in order to reclaim her rightful ownership of the masters after they were sold without her knowledge 2019. She poignantly calls these reissued albums “Taylor’s Versions”. What's even cooler, is that with each new "Taylor’s Version" album, there are some additional tracks included, all of which had been originally written and/or recorded for those previous albums but didn’t end up making the final tracklist at the time of each album’s initial release. All of those previously unreleased tracks now made widely available on each TV record, are, in Swift’s own words, songs that are “from the vault”.  

That’s kind of the idea the three of us had when brainstorming ways to relaunch Feral Feline. So yes, technically, this forthcoming collection will still consist of all those 2023 winter and spring submissions that were intended for the original proposed double issue, but given the nature of our impromptu hiatus, in our eyes it made more sense to call this a "Vault" issue rather than our original "double" idea. We're excited to let you all get a good look inside Feral Feline’s own “vault”. As mentioned earlier, it just felt so callous for us to restart our magazine and forget about all the pieces sent in for Issues 3 and 4. No need to worry though, we haven’t forgotten about them.

The vault of Feral Feline will be opening soon.