Letter from the Editor
Issue Twelve will be my last issue with BWO. I've watched the journal grow from early summer 2017, when I was the only staff member, to a vibrant team of people and hundreds of contributors and submitters whose work I value endlessly. I cannot overstate how much joy, necessary questioning, and love all of the people involved in this journal have brought to me, and I look forward to following all the amazing work they release into the world. But Issue Twelve also comes to you many months after I would have wanted to launch it, as difficulties in the world piled together and delayed the logistic compilation and release.
In the past year, I gained comprehensive diagnoses to contextualize my chronic illness as the United States government and individual inhabitants, from strangers to close family members, revealed just how little they value the lives of chronically ill individuals. I experienced the worst levels of social anxiety and burnout I've had in decades and yet found relief in finally re-examining my mental health and neurodivergence. I became involved with unionization efforts at my college after the pandemic worsened economic instability and job unpredictability, only to hear a trustee label the school “an institution, not a community,” after young activists demonstrated exactly the ideals a community should aim toward. I am trying to actively and consistently embody disability justice and channel the future I want to create. Through all of it, I thought about the stories in BWO and what they can and, also, cannot offer.
As a literary editor, I've always believed in the power of stories and storytelling: we come to understand ourselves and each other through the frameworks we have available, and good, innovative writing can challenge and expand those frameworks. That's what I love most about BWO, the moments when submitters shed light on our social and political landscape in complicated, well-articulated, and necessary ways. But I also shied away from becoming an English major, leaning instead into identity studies and public policy, because the competitive hyper-vulnerability and “awareness” of creative writing never felt like enough to truly comprise change.
Writing, bluntly, does not get bodies in the streets, does not get mutual aid to those who need it at any given moment, does not reshape material conditions. And we need to think about how writing can introduce people to ideas and movements so they can begin to access justice through it, as a continual and lifelong process. How can writing challenge the overly convenient, false narratives of history that many of us learn, with linear progress only? How can writing prompt us to demand and create better systems around ourselves?
This issue captures what happens when the simple, progressive narrative of history breaks down, when we live in a world that demands we radically re-envision what we can and should be. I am incredibly proud to consider it my final issue. In her poem “the front page,” Norah Brady demands, “Look, there is a man in prison for finding bodies / among bodies.” Meanwhile, Sarah Huddleston constructs a similar scene, where “Under the trees lay the body(s).... my hundred body(s) waiting / to be reborn.”
What a dystopian state asks is that we reduce people to bodies, with personal, moral, and emotional qualities removed. This is, of course, what the writers and artists in this issue criticize: it structures and unsettles their pieces at once. Sometimes, this is in context of U.S. electoral, political, and moral crisis. The failure to recognize immigrants as full-fledged individuals deserving of rights appears in Emily Sun’s “Eating Kellogg's Kraves As ICE Tells Me To Leave This Country,” in which “My stomach roils / but I feel so // American!” Meanwhile, in “abnormal” by Yeji Kim, the anxieties of the COVID-19 pandemic emerge through extreme racism and xenophobia, with “He says chinese virus but what he really means is something different. I think he means i hate you go back to your country why did you ever come here anyway this is all your fault ihateyouihateyouihateyou.”
But this apocalyptic era is by no means restricted to the U.S. Sometimes, such as in Maggie Sun’s “kumari,” this involves Hindu and Buddhist understandings of kumari, in which “the rusty halls of tradition don’t age. they crumble. / yet somehow the living goddess drips with injury.” Other times, this permeates to a personal level beyond any arbitrary national borders, as Nicole Li depicts in her reasons “Why I’ve Never Been to Jiangxi, China”: “because the Cultural Revolution was a revolution in blood / because a boy pulled himself apart by the bones / because he painstakingly rebuilt himself / because my father’s ambition outgrew his body.”
I think this is the angriest issue of BWO published, with lines as bold as “To tell her oppressor what the fuck was up,” dropping all pretense. It's also, though, one full of interiority, of intensely personal self-reflection, grief, and acceptance. Those emotions co-exist not despite but dependent on each other, and they signify the deep uncertainty and complexity that pervades us all right now.
It is our hope that you find the pieces in this issue, and the pieces in all our issues, representative of what it feels to live amidst this uncertainty and complexity. It is also our hope that you find a way to create your own art, meaning, and change in this wider world. If we play some small part in that, we’re eternally grateful.
Courtney Felle
Editor-in-Chief
With love to Marriah Talbott-Malone (the most committed, energetic, and talented prose editor and point person I could've asked for), Tejaswi Rawal, Maheen Shahbazi, past and future BWO team members, all the lovely BWO contributors and submitters who've entrusted us with their heartfelt and effortful work, and all the readers who value literature and community alongside us <3
Issue Twelve will be my last issue with BWO. I've watched the journal grow from early summer 2017, when I was the only staff member, to a vibrant team of people and hundreds of contributors and submitters whose work I value endlessly. I cannot overstate how much joy, necessary questioning, and love all of the people involved in this journal have brought to me, and I look forward to following all the amazing work they release into the world. But Issue Twelve also comes to you many months after I would have wanted to launch it, as difficulties in the world piled together and delayed the logistic compilation and release.
In the past year, I gained comprehensive diagnoses to contextualize my chronic illness as the United States government and individual inhabitants, from strangers to close family members, revealed just how little they value the lives of chronically ill individuals. I experienced the worst levels of social anxiety and burnout I've had in decades and yet found relief in finally re-examining my mental health and neurodivergence. I became involved with unionization efforts at my college after the pandemic worsened economic instability and job unpredictability, only to hear a trustee label the school “an institution, not a community,” after young activists demonstrated exactly the ideals a community should aim toward. I am trying to actively and consistently embody disability justice and channel the future I want to create. Through all of it, I thought about the stories in BWO and what they can and, also, cannot offer.
As a literary editor, I've always believed in the power of stories and storytelling: we come to understand ourselves and each other through the frameworks we have available, and good, innovative writing can challenge and expand those frameworks. That's what I love most about BWO, the moments when submitters shed light on our social and political landscape in complicated, well-articulated, and necessary ways. But I also shied away from becoming an English major, leaning instead into identity studies and public policy, because the competitive hyper-vulnerability and “awareness” of creative writing never felt like enough to truly comprise change.
Writing, bluntly, does not get bodies in the streets, does not get mutual aid to those who need it at any given moment, does not reshape material conditions. And we need to think about how writing can introduce people to ideas and movements so they can begin to access justice through it, as a continual and lifelong process. How can writing challenge the overly convenient, false narratives of history that many of us learn, with linear progress only? How can writing prompt us to demand and create better systems around ourselves?
This issue captures what happens when the simple, progressive narrative of history breaks down, when we live in a world that demands we radically re-envision what we can and should be. I am incredibly proud to consider it my final issue. In her poem “the front page,” Norah Brady demands, “Look, there is a man in prison for finding bodies / among bodies.” Meanwhile, Sarah Huddleston constructs a similar scene, where “Under the trees lay the body(s).... my hundred body(s) waiting / to be reborn.”
What a dystopian state asks is that we reduce people to bodies, with personal, moral, and emotional qualities removed. This is, of course, what the writers and artists in this issue criticize: it structures and unsettles their pieces at once. Sometimes, this is in context of U.S. electoral, political, and moral crisis. The failure to recognize immigrants as full-fledged individuals deserving of rights appears in Emily Sun’s “Eating Kellogg's Kraves As ICE Tells Me To Leave This Country,” in which “My stomach roils / but I feel so // American!” Meanwhile, in “abnormal” by Yeji Kim, the anxieties of the COVID-19 pandemic emerge through extreme racism and xenophobia, with “He says chinese virus but what he really means is something different. I think he means i hate you go back to your country why did you ever come here anyway this is all your fault ihateyouihateyouihateyou.”
But this apocalyptic era is by no means restricted to the U.S. Sometimes, such as in Maggie Sun’s “kumari,” this involves Hindu and Buddhist understandings of kumari, in which “the rusty halls of tradition don’t age. they crumble. / yet somehow the living goddess drips with injury.” Other times, this permeates to a personal level beyond any arbitrary national borders, as Nicole Li depicts in her reasons “Why I’ve Never Been to Jiangxi, China”: “because the Cultural Revolution was a revolution in blood / because a boy pulled himself apart by the bones / because he painstakingly rebuilt himself / because my father’s ambition outgrew his body.”
I think this is the angriest issue of BWO published, with lines as bold as “To tell her oppressor what the fuck was up,” dropping all pretense. It's also, though, one full of interiority, of intensely personal self-reflection, grief, and acceptance. Those emotions co-exist not despite but dependent on each other, and they signify the deep uncertainty and complexity that pervades us all right now.
It is our hope that you find the pieces in this issue, and the pieces in all our issues, representative of what it feels to live amidst this uncertainty and complexity. It is also our hope that you find a way to create your own art, meaning, and change in this wider world. If we play some small part in that, we’re eternally grateful.
Courtney Felle
Editor-in-Chief
With love to Marriah Talbott-Malone (the most committed, energetic, and talented prose editor and point person I could've asked for), Tejaswi Rawal, Maheen Shahbazi, past and future BWO team members, all the lovely BWO contributors and submitters who've entrusted us with their heartfelt and effortful work, and all the readers who value literature and community alongside us <3