SPRING 2020 | Volume 2, Issue 2

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

They’ve taken the rims off the basketball hoops near my house. Don’t ask me who “they” are exactly—the town, the state, the virus; it doesn’t really matter—all trudging and heavy-handed conspirators against joy, all marauding and relentless conspirators against the benign successes and failures of day to day life—conspirators against the most basic human endeavor of movement. I have a strange sudden nostalgia for the crowded platforms of the DC metro trains of my undergraduate years. A desire to be going somewhere. To be involved in something. To be anxious about direction. To be bored as I wait simply because the before and after is so eventful. To be rushed. To be nervous. To be homesick. To feel the gravity and debauchery of the city. To be living. To be aging. And I deeply miss Dublin and this year’s brand of last decade’s tunes being busked on Grafton Street. I’ll return. All of us will. But there is a blip on the tape now that we can’t recover.

We have entered a season of exile that is unique and most onerous. It is an exile not from our homes, but from the places we wish to escape to. And that is somehow more damning. More claustrophobic. More confining. More irredeemable. Worse, we are given nothing to fear but the obvious. That is not a life; it is an intermission and we are best to treat it as such. Those who don’t know better will tell you that this is a perfect time to write; all free from those pesky responsibilities of living your life. What they (another feckless, faceless “they”) don’t understand is that all worthwhile writing—literal or abstract—is about a life on the move. About a body in motion, and a spirit in riot and redemption. It demands access to a brand of melancholy only found in hotel lobbies in fallen European cities. So don’t vilify yourself too harshly if you find your pages temporarily empty. Just be well and hurry back. In turn, we present to you a more compact issue than normal, as some of our contributors take hiatus. We are never compromising—certainly not for some intrusive viral thug. Good art is responsive to the world around it. Great art rejects it entirely.

Cheers,

Joseph M. Reynolds