Spring 2023 - Decoy Issue - The Harvard Advocate

Note: All events described in this manifesto are either very true or very made-up. There are two doors and two brothers. Also two butterflies and a golden key. Choose wisely.

Paul Yoon is the author of four previous works of fiction: Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book; Snow Hunters, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award; The Mountain, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year; and Run Me to Earth, which was one of Time Magazine's Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in the Hudson Valley, New York. Yoon is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Harvard University.

Edited by Mira Alpers

Madeline Cash is the founder and co-editor of Forever Magazine. Her fiction has been featured in The Drift, The Baffler, Muumuu House and more. Her debut short story collection Earth Angel was published by Clash Books in April. We sat down with Cash over zoom back in February to talk about everything from being banned from cemeteries, to religion, to Y2K aesthetics.

Edited by Talia Blatt

Sheila Heti is a Canadian novelist, playwright, and essayist. The Fiction Board of The Harvard Advocate met with her over Zoom the morning of December 15, 2022. We spoke about her novels and children’s books, theater, mushrooms, reading her diaries in The New York Times, artificial intelligence, and how maybe everything is just fiction.

Mirrorselves

At nine years old, I sit at the bathroom mirror and open both sides of the medicine cabinet to reveal my infinity self. In a long identical row, I am transfixed by the other mes. We are in the same stretched-neck candy striped shirt, our mouths full of the same funny shaped teeth, topped by the same blunt bowl cut. When I blink, they blink. When I stick out my tongue, theirs follow. Until, in the back row, one stands up confidently. In my own reflection me and all the other mes lock on her as she stands, pulls her shirt over her head and wraps it around her fist. She cocks back and with one hit, shatters the mirror. She crawls out of the cabinet, bare chested and bloody, leading all of my mirrorselves, running like hell out of the bathroom and down the street. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to find where they’ve gone, wondering if I should be there too.

Edited by Talia Blatt

Allegra Goodman is an American novelist and short story writer based in Cambridge, MA. The fiction board of The Harvard Advocate hosted her in the Advocate building on 21 South Street for a conversation about Jewishness, children, her time at Harvard, and her most recent novel, Sam, which was published this January.

Every week, a beautiful lady who looks like me comes into the shop. Or rather, she’s beginning to look like me, like a fancy version of me, because every time she comes in some piece of her face has changed. And I have studied her face, believe me. I know the shape of her nostrils, the peach fuzz gleam on the side of her jaw, the little crease on her bottom lip where a crescent of pearly lip gloss shines like a tiny moon. I don’t know how or why this is happening, but all these features have been shifting to make her face look more like mine, and it might be that I’m starting to look more like her, too.

The priest of the Knoxville, IA diocese lived a life steeped in uncertainty. The fact that he could not know the internal experience of every person he encountered—that he could not be sure whether his congregants were tuned in to his homilies or zoned out or (worse yet) thinking about how shitty the homilies were—how absolutely daft and self-evident and devoid of any life-applicable advice—brought him countless nights of anguish. Did they find him embarrassing? Was he embarrassing, up there, with his face sweat dripping all down his neck and onto his dainty little frock?¹

Google is running an experimental version of Earth. ChatGPT wants to write your emails. DALL-E understands that happiness is the softest green and will show you photos of someone who doesn’t exist. A decoy is an imitation or a temptation, used to distract and capture. For the DECOY issue, we want to be misled, lured, ensnared between the fictitious and the real.