note from the editors
Part 1
It appears that I’ve been handed a torch, and I feel its incredible heat and weight in my hands. I’m not quite sure what to do with it, so I’ve decided to go ahead and write this in the hopes that parsing my way through will shed off some of this incredible dread and hesitation. There is much to talk about, and here’s how I will talk about it.
My therapist has described this peculiar time and place we find ourselves in as “shifting sands,” which has helped me understand and navigate my feelings big and small, worldly and academic, on a day-by-day basis. Some days I can walk with a spring in my step because I’ve said the right things in class and later that night I’ve cooked a good meal and laughed myself to tears with my roommates. Other days I look at my surroundings and angrily resist the passive acceptance of an ongoing pandemic, the worshiping of the ultimate echelons of high intellectualism and employability, and how I am expected to carry it all in stride. Sometimes I feel the beating heart of my own life in the small, sweet, simple moments; at other times I feel perilously inconsequential in systems so large that no one can get their heads above it all to dismantle them. Finding myself in these simultaneous realities is both jarring and incomprehensible.
Working on this issue of Red Weather has been a respite from it all, because if there is anything that I do believe, it is in the perseverance of art and the resilience of its creators, simply for the sake of its beauty and its power to relate people to people. One of my favorite parts of the editorial process is considering the order in which our submissions will appear in the magazine. The opportunity to take these seemingly disparate works of art and arrange them in a way that creates a larger emotional arc, a story larger than what was there before, is exalting. Suddenly, it is as if all these works were meant to come together in this way and at this particular time, and I can’t imagine experiencing them differently. As one of my professors would say, referencing Marshall McCluhan’s influential media studies essay: “The medium is the message!”
Knowing how important this publication is to me, I know that it is just as—if not more— important to the talented writers and artists featured in this issue, who, through the brave and mortifying act of putting their work out there, continue the ever-pertinent and inherent endeavor to create beautiful things, to get your feet down in the shifting sands, to raise the torch higher despite the rising floods.
And to you, readers: as you peruse these wonderful pages full of angst, absurdity, darkness, and contemplative, sublime beauty, I invite you all to partake in this pursuit as well, because we all have a job in the creation of beautiful things; the profound impact of art can’t be known without a community to know it themselves and to keep it precious.
— Eva Glassman ‘23
Part 2
As Eva said, leadership is changing. I have nothing to say and nothing to leave you with except this beautiful quote, which I once discovered my sophomore year when I most needed it and which I have rediscovered once again, by way of a wonderful accident (which, as we all know, is how life’s best happenings occur). And it is these words that I will meditate on for the forth-coming weeks as I try in vain to avoid contemplating an impending future that has arrived all too quickly and slowly and yet just at the right time.
“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
— Rachel Lu ‘22