Temporality / Object Permanence issue is now open for submissions.

Read our debut issue ‘Tales of Oddities and Peculiarities ‘under the ‘ISSUE’ tab

Calling all perilously-peculiar-poets, furtive writers of fiction, and lovers of literature!

The Secret Garden Journal exists to publish the poetry-infused pages of secret journals, and stories that have collected dust in the innermost corners of restless imaginations. The unfiltered narratives of life and literature that are waiting to be digested, mused over and listened to.

This journal is by lovers of writing, for lovers of writing.

Lots of love, and literary well-wishes,

Emmanuelle.

You are cordially invited to The Secret Garden.

August 2025: Temporality / Object Permanence

Temporal (adjective) tem·​po·​ral

1. of or relating to time as opposed to eternity. 

2. of or relating to the temples or the sides of the skull.

Object Permanence (noun) ob·​ject per·​ma·​nence

1. referring to a child’s understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched.

Tell me about something that exists in perpetuity, regardless of whether or not it is tangible to see, touch or hear. Tell me about the picture frames. Tell me about the dust that gathers in the place of memory, tell me about the portrait in your wallet and how it got there (and why, for whatever reason, you haven’t let it go yet). Write a farewell letter, of an uncertain unbecoming. Tell me how time lacerates tenderness, and those two most fragile points in your skull. 

Take my hand and guide me. I won’t tell.

Think: ‘Sylvia’s Death’ by Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf’s letters, eulogistic poetry. ‘Tulips’ by Sylvia Plath. Once again, your own journal.

“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”

- Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden