![[smiths] MAGAZINE](https://smithsmag.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/186361653_865035684433767_6609764901529448632_n.jpg)
Narrator
The theme “Narrator” aims to explore who controls the narrative, what shapes our perception of the world, and how we manage to create a sense of individuality despite. We asked contributors to reflect on who shaped their perception of them growing up, the influence of social media, the spread of misinformation and abuses of this power.
Throughout this issue, contributors have taken on the theme and explored it in various ways, including short stories told by unreliable narrators, poems on self-identity and childhood, and photography depicting a sole narrator in control of their surroundings.
Editor
Lauren Taylor
Social Media and Production Manager
Victoria Brustad
Designers
Aysha Leach & Niamh Seaber
-
-
Away with the Fairies
In a letter addressed to fictional friend ‘Elpie’ (based of Elpis, the Greek goddess of hope) is attached a docufiction and imagined archive exploring the transformative power of the imagination. Can dreaming be radical, and is this why we are discouraged and shamed out of it from a young age? Is fiction naïve or a…
-
-
We are tied together…
We are tied together. Through intricate strands of wool woven on tapestry looms. To you, I direct this. Pointed to the myths, folklore and stories. A collection of characters: Enchanter, Saviour, Villain, the role you played, told in these threads. You stayed for a time, intertwined line after line, sharing your shades and hues no…
-
-
My little sister asked
H: Who is in control? M: They tell us ‘it’s the people,’ But surely it cannot be? For the people fight for change, But they cast us out for being ‘crazy.’ That we’re ‘human animals’ They tell us half the tale, And sing us half the song. They say ‘democracy for all,’ leaving out ‘but…
-
-
La Suisse
Here is another controversial work from the mind of the ever-debated Arthur Nasred, talking this time about a meal he enjoyed and how corruption can seep into the very food you eat, even if those responsible for it are victims of the corruption themselves. Ah! The land of landscape! Summit to this! Let me be…
-
Worry Less Dream More
-
Aperitivo
Sammy had invited Manuela over for a drink. This made me uneasy, as the more time we spent together the more it became clear we disagreed on almost everything. Everything except the spirit to mixer ratio. The problem was, the more we drank, the more we disagreed. She was always trying to be difficult. Climbing…
-
Identity Dissonance
Don’t worry about the splinters from your throat. For you, I will be a girl as much as lightning is a girl. With inherited loom, I will weave myself a cloak, out of language, whose fabric: taffeta, and velvet, and layers of lace pressed across my lips. Tiresias beat a snake and became a woman; I…
-
To be an indie superstar…
-
‘But I’ve / not read a voice like my own like my own voice will be.’
A couple of weeks ago I attended a talk by the poet Alice Notley. She wore three masks which were gods, and she told us that humanity fell out of heaven when it discovered the texture of colour: when we no longer saw colour as transparent, when we gave colour touch, rough sensory touch, then…
-
Misty Suburbs
Susan’s house could have been described as prototypically suburban. It was of the oppressively geometric, “pleasant enough,” variety of home that hovered comfortably, but not very far, above the meek greenery of its accompanying lawn. When viewed from the road in front, the house looked so ludicrously rectangular and blandly photogenic that a mail man…
-
can time really change everything?
does our childhood self, unhealed or not, hold who we find a home in? wherever is possible; or wherever we are accepted. did they keep you singing in a nostalgic serenity? mine did. i was once very close to getting out of here; a little too close than what i’d wanted. the drums were unfeeling,…
-
Who Shapes Our Thoughts?
When I was a child, I thought I was the only person that mattered. When I was a teenager, I thought I was the only person who knew anything. I was the only one who was ‘right’ and I couldn’t understand why nobody saw the world in the same way as me. Now, I think…
-
-
current affairs, family relations, ‘eleftheria’
– a collection of notes from zakynthos, from various conversations, across a span of a week. the last two times i spent time with my family i was dealing with bereavement; the first in summer which was a more personal, the most recent was the final week of october – where i was trying to…
-
I think I’m nineteen
I think I’m nineteen and eating in bed, eating a bowl of comfort on a single sticky duvet. A sticky bed in a cornered room, dimmed by the fake curtains to block out the sun and lit with yellow lighting. Day in, day out it’s the Summer of 2021. I’m in my bed and I’m…
-
Do you feel lonely?
-
The Story of a Name
A midsummer night’s dream was where she caught me, I was better off being a donkey’s head, instead of shouldering the phantasmal grey pressure of a planet. Night creatures would walk around under her skin for three quarters of the year, dissolving figures, shadows that would offend evenly across a board of toast men like…