Note from the Editors
We write to you from the edges of two precipices, one more final and one more imminent: a graduation and a semester abroad. This is our first and only issue as co-editors, and the anticipation of these life-changes as well as the fleetingness of our collaboration has infused our time together with an exciting urgency. As one of us prepares for half a year across the world and the other for the beginning of adulthood, we have both found ourselves even more pensive and introspective than usual. The shapes of these brutalist buildings, the paths we take through the glen, the rhythms of our lives here–all seem to have begun to inhabit a more solid form. Perhaps this is because their unraveling into memory and past is growing so close–we want to hold on to them.
This issue came to us slowly, deliberately; our boards were selective and our layout purposeful. It is our sky, it splits itself open, and, as Dylan Buckser-Schulz puts it, “Craned and beholden we watch.” It’s full of us, and of you–brimming with memories, dreams, and faces. It’s delicate and calm like the recycled filament of Emily Van Ecko’s Memory; dusted with the sentimental sweetness of Elizabeth Gee’s story about her family rituals. At times it is cold and lightless: we creep down into the limestone depths of Sydney Lee’s Have We Been Here Before? and face the sharp, frozen icicles slicing through Katherine Rao’s photograph. It glimmers with nostalgia, too, in Sofia Bagdade’s yearning train ride through upstate New York and the peaceful quiet of Clare Robinson’s West Coast of Panama.
Faces are pricked, collected, lost, and rearranged–as Dana Blatte writes, “everyone pries their faces off but I still can’t find mine.” Digital artwork distorts and dissects; sculptures and ceramics, experimental projections–this issue challenges the boundaries of our mediums. As we continue to reflect on what will soon be gone, we hope you enjoy what is in your hands, now.