Dear readers,

Welcome to issue #169 of TriQuarterly, and thank you to the many hands that helped nurture this collection into the vivacious garden of voices it has become. Collaborative work like this gives me hope, and I hope it inspires you too. Like a seed cloud carried in the wind and toward an unknown, distant place, projects like TriQuarterly remind me of one certainty — the seeds of our work will land, and they will grow.

It would be impossible to organize every poem, essay, story, and video in Issue 169 into one neat theme. There are, however, traces of connection. There’s a certain kind of connective tissue, like the mycelial network of a fungus, that comes with living through something larger than ourselves. 

This issue, in some ways, revolves around memory and what we inherit, both claimed and unclaimed, such as in Margaret Redmond Whitehead’s essay “Door to the Clouds”, where a speaker pieces together her father’s slow disappearance from her family’s life with excerpts of poetry he left behind. Showcasing a larger, systemic form of inheritance, Esé Emmanuel’s video essay “problem space” showcases heaps of textiles, once discarded by the “Global North,” now in a market in Lagos, where the film’s subject participates in the “violent hyper-productive regime of global capital.”

When considering “inheritance” as what we, ourselves, give to the next generation, one of the most surprising throughlines in this issue is the sheer volume of stories that include children who either fail to meet, or willfully defy, their parents’ expectations–In Kara Crawford’s short story “Trimming” a girl is chastised by her mother for her incessant itching and obsession with other peoples’ teeth. Lindsay Hunter’s story “The Nudists” begins when a child’s parents are called into the principal’s office to discuss her worrisome behavior. In his poem “Dusk” Nick Lantz poignantly captures the thin barrier between childhood innocence and the one-way trip toward “the reservoir’s great ocean.” I can’t quite articulate why we have such a large cast of disobedient, audacious, and sometimes strange, young people–but I find myself rooting for them all (and by proxy, our future!).

This theme of inheritance and memory also feels tangled with ideas of time. In Joyce Dehli’s “Reprieve”, a different, but equally potent reclamation of memory and time transpires. The essay’s speaker expresses gratitude for a moment of exhale amid the looming reality of cancer. Of human mortality, the speaker writes, “A body carries its own death, a promise it will keep.”

The works featured in this issue remind me of how time is more mysterious, more noncompliant than the utilitarian ways in which we use it, which is to say time is mistaken as a constant in our lives. Rather, in the world of Issue 169, time is very much alive, and in that way, movable. 

Thank you to TriQuarterly’s esteemed Genre Editors–Hannah Bonner, Starr Davis, Dan Fliegel, Jennifer Companik, Patrick Bernhard, Emily Mirengoff, and Laura Joyce-Hubbard–without whom it would’ve been impossible to curate such a striking collection of works. Thank you to advisors Colin Pope, Sarah Shulman, and Northwestern’s English Department for your continued support and generous guidance. 

Thank you, lastly, to all our subscribers and readers out there in the world. Your support and passion helps me believe in our world, and the work we do, a little more.

With gratitude, 

–Jess Masi, Managing Editor

MASTHEAD

Managing Editor: Jess Masi

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Shulman 

Staff Advisor: Colin Pope 

Film Editor: Hannah Bonner 

Fiction Editors: Jennifer Companik, Emily Mirengoff, Patrick Bernhard, Laura Joyce-Hubbard

Nonfiction Editor: Starr Davis 

Poetry Editor: Daniel Fliegel 

Social Media Intern: Alyson Font

Readers: Nathalie Bonds, Erika Carey, Eleanor Colligan, Liz Howey, Nathaniel Forester, Jess Limardo, Claire Moacdieh, Sarbani Mukherjee, Amanda Norton, Paula Nwosu, Andrew Stojkovich, genea tafesse, Amanda Vitale, Jeremy Wilson, Eileen Zampa, Jodi Cressman, Amanda Dee, Kristi Ferguson, Susan Lerner, Jenna Mather, Andi Myles, Sarah Minor, Kathryn O'Day, Lauren Short, Yvonne W, Kelsey Werkheiser, D.S. Winters, Christine Barkley, William Ward Butler, Daylyn Carrigan, Abigail Chang, Cindy King, Jessica Manack, Amanda Maret Scharf, Tanya Young