So much has happened in the six months since our last issue, though I could say this about every TriQuarterly issue I’ve been a part of.

Living through an important historical era is exhausting. I must address our neighbors in Highland Park who are among the most recent victims of gun violence; it is unlikely they will be the last, unless there is a sweeping change of regulations. It does not seem like a priority in the American political system, where our court is more concerned with restricting access to reproductive healthcare. Meanwhile, inflation is rising, as are global temperatures. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve experienced all of this already. Through it all, our TriQuarterly team has edited an issue that speaks to our present, with a conversation to the past.

In the last few years things seem to have sped and slowed simultaneously. In Kelly Magee’s “ripped from the headlines” story, “Florida Girl Kidnaps Girl from Hospital Waiting Room,” she writes, “​​Ever since her emergency, Mary’s age has been fractured, some strands becoming ever younger, some skipping ahead whole decades, some frozen in place. Maybe age is always like that, and she just didn’t notice it before.”

We can look at the past with a critical eye and ever aging wisdom, or accept our seeming naïveté was bliss. These aren’t mutually exclusive, as portrayed in Dorsey Craft’s poem “When You Are Fifteen,” which recounts a young love, idealistic and passionate, while waiting in a deer stand. Adam Clay writes, “Another name for nostalgia, / some kind of traffic / from yesterday…” in his poem “Creation Story.”

How can one learn if we’re doomed to repeat? I suggest taking Amanda Krupman’s advice in her essay “Distortion,” “Commit these facts to memory and call on them when it storms.” This is a classic question of the human condition, as exemplified in Elizabeth Arnold’s new translation of the tenth-century text “The Wanderer,” in which the narrator laments his current state, “Alas the time gone, / slipped under / night’s curtain / —as if it had never been!” It’s still relevant one thousand-plus years later.

We could call it reflection, or nostalgia, or even aging. Whatever it is, the works featured in Issue 162 look back to get ahead.

—Joshua Bohnsack

Managing Editor: Joshua Bohnsack
Assistant Managing Editor: Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Film Editor: Sarah Minor
Fiction Editors: Vanessa Chan, Jennifer Companik, Laura Joyce-Hubbard, Emily Mirengoff, Mariah Rigg
Nonfiction Editor: Starr Davis
Poetry Editor: Daniel Fliegel
Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
Technology Director: Ken Panko
Technical Advisors: Rodolfo Vieira, Natalie Roman, Garrett Gassensmith

Staff: Ally Ang, Amanda Dee, Ashton Carlile, Christopher Lombardo, Corey Miller, Ellen Hainen, Emma Fuchs, Erika Carey, George Abraham, Gillian Barth, Grace Musante, Ivis Whitright, Jackson McGrath, Jameka Williams, Jonathan Jones, Katana Smith, Laurie Thomas, Liz Howey, Lydia Abedeen, Marissa Higgins, Marssie Mencotti, May Dugas, Megan Sullivan, Michaela Ritz, Michele Popadich, Morgan Eklund, Nimra Chohan, Patrick Bernhard, Prince Bush, Puck Orabel, Rebecca van Laer, Salwa Halloway, Susan Lerner, Suzanne Scanlon