Letter from the Editor
In college, I’m a member of our Tabletop Club, which hosts game nights and roleplaying events. (Nerdy, I know, not to mention on brand for a writer. There’s a reason Tabletop has so much overlap with our Creative Writing Table.) Every other month, the exec board hosts a Murder Mystery, where for a night we all live inside a 50s diner, or a flamboyant but secretly bankrupted casino, or an eccentric, rich debutante’s birthday party. Some try to solve the murder, yes, but others become consumed in their subplots: a love triangle with a dead brother’s best friend and his worst enemy, a deadbeat husband whose business the trophy wife actually controls, a misbehaved monkey named Fish that steals priceless heirloom necklaces. (All of which actually happened to me.) The worlds, and the characters, take on their own forms. We become them, if only for four hours. And in doing so, as we try to keep our dirty laundry hidden, work out the difficulties of our lives, accomplish all our goals, and pretend that people we perhaps barely know are our closest friends, we sometimes become more ourselves, too, all the awkwardness and stressors of real, daily life stripped away, leaving just us.
Which is why I was so excited when my friend hosted one he’d written, set in a fantasy realm called The Dreamscape, with faeries, boogeymen, and dreamers all competing to amass Belief. Literally, I could enter a dream; I could help direct the dream. When I told him I’d be coming, he said, “Great, I have the perfect role for you,” and within days I had a role assigned via email: Titania, Queen of the Faeries, candidate (and eventual winner!) for ruler of The Dreamscape itself. I was immensely flattered I struck my friend as a perfect “Queen of the Faeries.” I listened to a pump-up, boss-bitch playlist in the days before, trying to channel the confidence he saw in me, one I didn’t always see in myself. I wanted to be ready.
I showed up in an elegant, green dress with lace like interlocked vines, temporary flower tattoos across my collarbones, crown-braided hair, and dark, sparkling lipstick. If a costume could ever transform someone completely, this transformed me: flitting from person to person, smiling, campaigning, collecting chaos and then managing it all. I wondered: what would it be like to live within this self all the time? What would it have been like to have an alternate, dream-like space to enter earlier, before college? Would I have consolidated this more confident self sooner? What if?
Those questions are exactly what the pieces in this issue pose. If we deserve better, then what could “better” have looked like? What could it still look like? Maggie Curtis, for example, imagines a small queer utopia in her story “In A Moment,” the characters’ relationship supersaturated with bliss, if only for an afternoon. Alissa Simon, meanwhile, hopefully predicts her niece’s future, where even despite the difficulties of girlhood, she can “gorge yourself on your honey” and “make it hard for us / to feed from you,” full of self-possession and strength. And, from the opposite end of reflecting backward, not forward, Zoe Goldstein’s Maxine in “What’s Your Wound?” contemplates all the small ways we lose our joys in life, joys we could have held tighter to, while listening to a ghost’s hauntingly beautiful music. Somewhere between, in her essay “It is sometimes dawn,” Amelia Ao recalls the brother she could have had, imagining a relationship with him that imposes itself over her actual relationship with her sister, a constant and seeping sense of nostalgia for a life not lived while a different one is in progress.
Even the cover is a nod to this dreaming. Ria Nair’s “Growing flowers inside my heart” allows the main figure to literally grow flowers from her forehead instead of relying on abstract metaphor. Between the soft filtering and the piecemeal beauty of the collage style (where one can choose only the best of the materials present), the piece becomes an ideal and idealized version of its components.
So enter this issue’s dreamscape. Live inside its characters’ and speakers’ minds for a while, and I promise you’ll find that magical, overwhelming feeling of forgetting yourself in something bigger than you. It’s all here.
Courtney Felle
Editor-in-Chief
Marriah Talbott-Malone Prose Editor
Maheen Shahbazi Poetry Editor
Christy Avery Poetry Reader
Srishti Uppal . Poetry Reader
Ottavia Paluch Poetry Reader
In college, I’m a member of our Tabletop Club, which hosts game nights and roleplaying events. (Nerdy, I know, not to mention on brand for a writer. There’s a reason Tabletop has so much overlap with our Creative Writing Table.) Every other month, the exec board hosts a Murder Mystery, where for a night we all live inside a 50s diner, or a flamboyant but secretly bankrupted casino, or an eccentric, rich debutante’s birthday party. Some try to solve the murder, yes, but others become consumed in their subplots: a love triangle with a dead brother’s best friend and his worst enemy, a deadbeat husband whose business the trophy wife actually controls, a misbehaved monkey named Fish that steals priceless heirloom necklaces. (All of which actually happened to me.) The worlds, and the characters, take on their own forms. We become them, if only for four hours. And in doing so, as we try to keep our dirty laundry hidden, work out the difficulties of our lives, accomplish all our goals, and pretend that people we perhaps barely know are our closest friends, we sometimes become more ourselves, too, all the awkwardness and stressors of real, daily life stripped away, leaving just us.
Which is why I was so excited when my friend hosted one he’d written, set in a fantasy realm called The Dreamscape, with faeries, boogeymen, and dreamers all competing to amass Belief. Literally, I could enter a dream; I could help direct the dream. When I told him I’d be coming, he said, “Great, I have the perfect role for you,” and within days I had a role assigned via email: Titania, Queen of the Faeries, candidate (and eventual winner!) for ruler of The Dreamscape itself. I was immensely flattered I struck my friend as a perfect “Queen of the Faeries.” I listened to a pump-up, boss-bitch playlist in the days before, trying to channel the confidence he saw in me, one I didn’t always see in myself. I wanted to be ready.
I showed up in an elegant, green dress with lace like interlocked vines, temporary flower tattoos across my collarbones, crown-braided hair, and dark, sparkling lipstick. If a costume could ever transform someone completely, this transformed me: flitting from person to person, smiling, campaigning, collecting chaos and then managing it all. I wondered: what would it be like to live within this self all the time? What would it have been like to have an alternate, dream-like space to enter earlier, before college? Would I have consolidated this more confident self sooner? What if?
Those questions are exactly what the pieces in this issue pose. If we deserve better, then what could “better” have looked like? What could it still look like? Maggie Curtis, for example, imagines a small queer utopia in her story “In A Moment,” the characters’ relationship supersaturated with bliss, if only for an afternoon. Alissa Simon, meanwhile, hopefully predicts her niece’s future, where even despite the difficulties of girlhood, she can “gorge yourself on your honey” and “make it hard for us / to feed from you,” full of self-possession and strength. And, from the opposite end of reflecting backward, not forward, Zoe Goldstein’s Maxine in “What’s Your Wound?” contemplates all the small ways we lose our joys in life, joys we could have held tighter to, while listening to a ghost’s hauntingly beautiful music. Somewhere between, in her essay “It is sometimes dawn,” Amelia Ao recalls the brother she could have had, imagining a relationship with him that imposes itself over her actual relationship with her sister, a constant and seeping sense of nostalgia for a life not lived while a different one is in progress.
Even the cover is a nod to this dreaming. Ria Nair’s “Growing flowers inside my heart” allows the main figure to literally grow flowers from her forehead instead of relying on abstract metaphor. Between the soft filtering and the piecemeal beauty of the collage style (where one can choose only the best of the materials present), the piece becomes an ideal and idealized version of its components.
So enter this issue’s dreamscape. Live inside its characters’ and speakers’ minds for a while, and I promise you’ll find that magical, overwhelming feeling of forgetting yourself in something bigger than you. It’s all here.
Courtney Felle
Editor-in-Chief
Marriah Talbott-Malone Prose Editor
Maheen Shahbazi Poetry Editor
Christy Avery Poetry Reader
Srishti Uppal . Poetry Reader
Ottavia Paluch Poetry Reader