Issue 155
Winter & Spring 2019
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Welcome to issue 155. Last winter, TriQuarterly launched an online issue archive that made every single story, poem, essay, and video ever published in the journal available to a worldwide audience. The project was a true labor of love, involving the scanning and indexing of thousands of printed pages dating back to our very first issue (which was released in the fall of 1958 and sold at a price of fifty cents).
Every now and then, I find myself paging through the issues in the online archive, reading decades-old works by writers like Tobias Wolff, Joyce Carol Oates, Stuart Dybek, and Grace Paley, and thinking about how these names weren’t always part of the literary canon. There was a time when these writers were considered emerging, when journals like TriQuarterly made it their mission to draw attention to their work. As the managing editor for issue 155, I’m proud to say that the work within its (digital) pages comes to us from some of the most vital voices in the literary community today. You may or may not yet recognize their names, but you’ll find their writing powerful, the content haunting, and their messages impossible to ignore. Two separate pieces address the topic of climate change, daring us to envision a future in which the commonplace becomes the stuff of legend. “Our children,” Allain Daigle predicts in his video essay “New Arctic,” “will dream about icebergs . . . strip our walls for the foundations.” And Allegra Hyde’s “Adjustments” foresees a time when we’ll tell our grandchildren stories of the days when “ice was so plentiful, people put it in their drinks just to watch it disappear.”
Ting Chang’s poem “Prophecy” also contemplates the future, its speaker seeming to call out simultaneously to a silenced mother “who used to speak,” and to an entire population of people outraged at the current political climate. “I reject walls and those who build them,” the speaker says. “I reject the safety of fear”; and, as readers, we feel ourselves becoming swept up in the “rising undercurrent,” joining in the resolve to stand up against the injustices in our world: “Say it now: The Future.”
But, of course, the future does not forge itself. As Chang notes in her poem “Patience,” and Ceridwen Hall observes in her essay “network,” the future is wrought out of the past. While “Patience” explores this notion on an individual level, with Chang listing the objects, places, and experiences she “come(s) from,” “network” examines it on a societal one. In an intricate weaving of then and now, Hall questions how far we’ve really come in communications technology while also calling attention to the lack of progress in workplace equality. In the late nineteenth century, we compressed our messages into telegrams; today, we compress them into rapid-fire texts. Back then women “earned lower wages, worked in smaller offices.” Now, here in the future, women are still fighting for equal pay.
We hope you’ll spend some time with this issue, exploring its content and contemplating the inquiries that gave rise to its works. We hope, too, that you’ll discover a new voice, a writer you’ve never read before—and that when you do, you’ll join us in spreading the word.
Carrie Muehle
Managing Editor
Managing Editor: Carrie Muehle
Assistant Managing Editor: Aram Mrjoian
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Film Editor: Sarah Minor
Fiction Editors: Joshua Bohnsack, Jennifer Companek, Marina Mularz, Nate Renie
Nonfiction Editor: Molly Sprayregen
Poetry Editor: Dane Hamann
Social Media Editor: Aram Mrjoian
Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
Media Architect: Harlan Wallach
Technical Advisors: Rodolfo Vieira, Nick Gertonson
Staff:
Ahsan Awan, Patrick Bernhard, Pascale Bishop, Erika Carey, Sara Connell, Bonnie Etherington, Audrey Fierberg, Dan Fliegel, Andrea Garcia, Caitlin Garvey, Ellen Hainen, Salwa Halloway, Madina Jenks, Jonathan Jones, Erin Keogh, Jen Lawrence, Adam Lizakowski, Marssie Mencotti, Natalia Nebel, Devin O’Shea Hillary Pelan, Megan Sullivan, Myra Thompson, Molly Tyler, Katherine Williams
Image from New Arctic
Excerpt from Permission
When Echo’s father gets swept away by a freak current off the Los Angeles coast, she enters a state of paralysis. Drawn to "the idea of a job where she didn't have to say a word," the failed young actress takes a job as a model at an art center, where she unexpectedly confronts a part of her past.
Episodes toward an Elegy for Halley’s Comet
1910
Mouths, the illustrator thinks, this story is full of mouths: mouths that cannot be fed, mouths belonging to children that fill themselves with the witch’s home, mouths of ovens that consume, the mouth of the witch who wants to eat the children.
Madwoman Ghazal
It is true we named our own sea dead.
On the houses nearby the bougainvillea flourishes.
On the shore we call this marvel majnouneh.
The sea is a body keening, glistening in sunlit flourishes.
Wade Park V.A.
Rain slices through me as if I was the grassy field. No matter how many times you turn the key, the lock will not open. The birth of someone’s hair piled high this morning on her head, which she did with her only remaining arm and hand. VA hospital, Wade Park.
Watching my Great-Uncle Shave, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, circa 1954
All memory revolves in fragments, my good doctor says, and the memories begun in trauma are the most shattered, like a white dinner plate thrown across the room at the antique clock on the wall.
At a Car Wash in Little Rock
I used to love to wash my car at night, at a car wash up the street from where I lived with my wife and baby son. At night I sometimes need to slip away.
An Introduction to Video Essays
The works in our winter suite are interested in process. These three new videos demonstrate how, like other literary genres, the “video essay” gets redefined by every new iteration. Like early examples of video art, each piece repurposes a technology to highlight the accidental art-experiences available within a utilitarian process.
Adjustments
For many years, we went to the lakes in the summers, but when the springs became like the summers and the winters like the springs, we left earlier—and then earlier still—until we were already at the lakes when it was time for us to arrive.
Wakened by Crows
In the woods, the sky
of our sleep breaking,
piece by piece. Nothing visible
in the leaves but the blackness