Latest
Emily Linstrom
Italy
Italy
Latest
A collection of essays, fiction, and poetry by female members of The Quail Bell Crew and select contributors. This is the third anthology by Quail Bell Magazine, a literary magazine for real and unreal stories from around the world. All proceeds will be donated to RAINN.
Essays & Explorations
Their artwork — their defiance — is their legacy.
When you and I are ready we too can lock arms and leave that house in the dark wood, that too many girls must venture into and fight their way out of.
*Editor's note: First appeared in American Slander
"When we too are armed and trained..."
Just east of Lake Como, nestled against the forested mountains of Cortenova, sits an inarguably haunted house.
My very personal account of moving to Italy, letting go of one's ghosts, and what a severed head in a pot of basil has to do with it.
I started to scribble a poem in Verona, titled 'I Want to Steal the Breasts of Juliet,' and while I never finished it, the sentiment still lingers...
Satan is a skinny b*tch.
There’s the haves and the have-nots, and the only thing standing between the two is a vinyl doll in pantaloons.
Consisting of spiced, curdled milk and lots of alcohol, this boozy bedtime drink dates back to the Middle Ages.
"What will we do with ourselves this afternoon, and the day after that, and the next thirty years?" Daisy Buchanan wasn't the only one to pose this existential dilemma.
*Editor's Note: First appeared in Rebelle Society
Paganism, Witchery, and Natural Magick
Talking "Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times" with author Thomas Waters
Overjoyed to be included in Volume III of the insanely gorgeous Venefica Magazine, published through Brooklyn's Catland. Preorders available now!
“They know you can take it. You have always been a warrior, even in your reluctance. Every life. They’re saying it now: She can handle it.”
A chat about being a modern Witch in a material world.
In Catholicism and Christian mysticism, there is a term known as 'the dark night of the soul...
When I was fifteen I spent a few weeks out of the spring semester as an exchange student in Cologne, Germany. Our many guided outings took us to cathedrals and archaeological...
What if the everyday ritual found an equally sacred place in one’s own Book of Days?
"Anyone who is familiar with Stravinsky’s “The Rite Of Spring” can attest that this time of year is anything but gentle..." On the ancient Pagan holiday, and how to keep the fire burning.
Humor
We didn't deserve you.
By Emily Linstrom I. Sweet spring island breeze, From the cafeteria I dreamed of greatness. II. Seeking to nourish FEMA-tented trustfund youth, I was made meme meat. III. In the aftermath the salad speaks of Netflix and new beginnings. Emily Linstrom is an American writer and artist residing in Italy.
Journalism
On the complicated nature of cultural appropriation, the power and potential of narrative, and why grandma always gets the final say—whether it’s Olive Garden or hot Sambal.
"Consisting of time-honored spells, rituals, and DIY remedies, as well as moon, crystal and herbal Magick, Witchery is both companion and grimoire, penned in the familiar voice of a friend who happens to be a successful Witch influencer."
I discovered the Tarot in my teens, at an age when you desperately want answers the corporeal world cannot provide...
In moments of dreaming, have you ever been aware of some shadowy ‘other’ just along the periphery, watching you and lending a subtle but unearthly hand to the proceedings? That’s Hidden Velvet.
"Among so many people, travel is less an experience and more of a consumerist pursuit for bragging rights. "
My Florentine adventure and chance encounter with an inspiring coffee entrepreneur this past summer.
penned under the name Emmie Linstrom
penned under the name Emmie Linstrom
penned under the name Emmie Linstrom
penned under the name Emmie Linstrom
CLASH Media (Note: these links are currently down due to publication transitions, please check back soon or hit me up for a transcript!)
It turned out the response to Winslet’s nudity was only half the rude awakening.
Crain family matriarch Olivia, played by the beguiling Carla Gugino, is the embodiment of bohemian-earth-mother-meets-ethereal-diva.
Like Nadia stumbling through her LES birthday bash, it’s all starting to feel like a series of vignettes to me, at once both repetitive and shifting for the worse a little more each time. I can’t tell if it’s me or the drugs.
Fiction
A macabre tale inspired by equal parts American gothic + Midwestern ghost towns + a late friend's account of a very real serial killer grandfather. Available now for print/digital sale on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1389531813/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1507878465&sr=8-3&keywords=black+dandy Publisher Statement: "Black Dandy is a quarterly literary journal dedicated to excellence in magic realism, surrealism, and the otherwise strange. Based in New Zealand, we're proud to feature top...
A two-truths-and-a-lie satire concerning lifestyle blogs, elite interior magazines, two con artists, and the necessary acquiring of things.
My award -winning short story about a Depression-era dustbowl family, and the many ways magic can be twisted to corrupt or cope.
They say she is the soul of all wasted women: beautiful and barren, she is the suicide of winter, the white bone buried beneath the seedling; a strange and dangerous tree awaiting its first blossom. There is one in every country that has felt the bite of winter: always a woman neither young nor old,...
A tale about a family of monstrous immortals squatting in "a part of London even London has no recollection of..."
Poetry/Prose (Mobile reading not recommended, best viewed on desktop)
Her flesh: exquisite astronomy, a gown of swimming constellations still— this is time as it was handed to me.
" The Graces always struck me as ultimate #squadgoals..."
Somewhere in your ancestral villa lives a woman who slices persimmons like she was born to handle knives and babies
Inspired by Massimo Bottura's famous dessert
Poems and reflections from my summer in Italy & Greece
1 year anniversary of my Featured Poet pieces on seduction, loss, women, and Castro's Cuba.
"my language like the knife that slices the oyster, savoring the gore as much— if not more— than the delicacy of meat"
Written in thanks for a year of shipwrecks + wonders
We are such stuff as dreams are made on---are dreams, therefore, the stuff of us?
One about a brother who died before I was born, but had he lived I’d not be here; the other about the mysteries of suburban women.
I carved out my flesh with breast-cupped shells, pressed until the blood mixed with the spit, till I perspired pearls and rose like Venus through all your girls, the trapdoor in your best laid hell I wanted to be more than the voluptuous swell devouring harbors, rock and Andromeda, longing for some divining rod to...
Mixed Media
The Liberation of Louise was inspired by a framed antique print of Queen Louise of Prussia that hung in my bedroom as a child and has travelled with me throughout the years, from East Coast to West, before finally being freed from her frame just before I moved to Italy.
"Erlking" is a modern-day interpretation of the darkly seductive Erlkönig, featured throughout folklore and most famously in Goethe's poem and Schubert's musical interpretation. Glimpsing backwards through his many mirrors, the Erlking's flimsy paper crown and casual attire suggest a creature resigned to his dwindling magic in a metropolis far from the forest.
A short visual narrative inspired by ancestral nostalgia, lucid dreaming, and the ache within each of us to rewrite our histories as the stuff of romantic epics, rather than tragic minutiae.
"Annabel" is a short film curated in the style of archival footage, set to Erik Satie's Gnossiene No.1 and narrated through an original poem. It tells the macabre little tale of a young woman who may be vampiric, may be tubercular, who haunts a WWII tenement looking for love-or at least a decent dining companion.
"Edinburgh is a mad god's dream..."
"Lavinia," a self portrait inspired by Shakespeare's first produced play Titus Andronicus.
A short film by Fernando Pacheco and Emily Linstrom. We created this film in a few hours, late on a Monday night. It's my first short film and my first time working with the lovely Ms. Linstrom.
"Radiance" by Snazz Mammoth featuring : Emily Linstrom Nicholas Adamski Director & DP: Brandon Herman Editor: Jackie Todd
Amor fati is a Latin phrase that loosely translates as "love of one's fate." It was not always so. There was a time when fate was a daemon riding my back, or else an explosion of prosperity I waited for, watched out for...
In-depth discussion with Sarah Valeri about my project Gilda's Girls, an intimate ongoing study in which all women are invited to participate.
Film
A handful of years ago I worked with a vocalist who met Angelina Jolie-Pitt while touring. She more or less said what most people who encounter the starlet report: that she's quiet, intense, unfailingly polite, and superhumanly beautiful.
It's a universal truth that the movies you loved as a kid don't always grow up with you. Conversely, it's a universal smack of awesome when they actually get better with age--yours, to be exact.