Foreword

We are living in a time where authenticity is a finite resource. Each passing day, the digital world is feeling less and less human. You don’t have to scroll far on your phone to be bombarded by images of people who don’t exist, advertisements trying to sell you products that might not be real. Your mum sends you an A.I. portrait she made of herself as a viking warrior. She likes it very much. You want to know what year the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded (1986) and Google’s A.I. tells you to kill yourself. All you want to do is open your phone without the inbuilt assistant screaming at you.

So you turn off your phone and take a walk down the street, try and breathe in the fresh air, look up at the trees and the old crumbling architecture that surrounds you. Tacked to the windows of the shops you pass are posters churned out of some slop-factory, riddled with inconsistencies and glaring mistakes. You enter a cafe, sit and order a breakfast and a tea, or a coffee if you prefer, and while you wait you look to your left; on the wall is a mural featuring people with the exact same face, the exact same grey look in their eyes. One of them has six fingers on each hand and drinks out of one-and-a-half cups of coffee. It’s undoubtedly been pumped out of some machine. There is no humanity behind it. No authenticity. You can’t trust anything.

You’re overcome with a sense of despair. When nothing around you is real, what does that make you? What does it mean to be authentic? 

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In this first issue of Flare we have compiled a selection of stories, poetry and essays, all of which aim to answer this question. Each of the writers published here do so in different ways, be that through Kofi Opam’s heartfelt and reflective prose in Won’t You Talk to Me, or the experimental and radical writing of Charly Murmann in The Circle, in Repeat, and David Devanny in Pea Rockeries. Dolly Nash and Janea Mancheski explore gender roles in After Eden and Playing it Cool respectively, whilst Mary Chhea and Jessica Bragg explore the female experience in A Kid’s Guide to Perimenopause and The Night Before New Years Eve. In A Chinese Family Gathering, Cece Daise reflects on the experience of not relating to your own family and culture and in Dull Reflections, Hannah Simpson deconstructs sexuality through body-horror. Rosie Kersley Williamson writes searingly in Glass Butterfly whilst William Cass explores the lives of multiple intersecting characters in Shift Change. In My Autism, Daniel Appleby discusses neurodivergence. In Astigmatism, Emily A.L. Whatley reflects on the past. In Not England but It’s Land, Andrew Searle relates the human experience to its environment and in Identity Theft, Jon Fain depicts the very human interaction that is a first date.

Each of these writers, listed in no particular order, hit on a different aspect of the human experience. We hope that, through reading this issue and reminiscing on the work compiled within, we may have answered this issue’s, and this time’s, central question. What does it mean to be human? And further, what does it mean to be authentic?

Will Alexander 2026