Letter from the Editor

Dear readers,

In Adrianna Jereb’s hypnotic “Sun and Toy,” a fugitive sex doll makes art for a hundred years as things go extinct around her, for worse and for better: “no more Mulanje cedar, also no more airplane.” Another year, another digital issue of So to Speak, another letter enumerating another set of horrors. What is the purpose of making art in a world like this one—that is to say, the only world there is to make art in? 

For the contributors in this issue, art is an urgent, explicit mouthpiece for commentary or an expression more elemental. Courtney Hayes Armstrong writes, “[“Anatomy of Grief”] granted me permission to speak about hypocrisy and abuse, a pervasive culture that is hidden behind closed doors.” For Ellen June Wright, “My abstract art is my purest expression of freedom for whoever I am, unfettered by the expectations of my gender, of my race or status.” For the dead young women in Mandira Pattnaik’s “Interning at the Monitor Room,” gluing together papier-mâché busts of the harassers who caused their honor killings is therapeutic. This form of art-making, a character explains, will allow the girls to “think clearly” so they can act to change the world. 

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” W.H. Auden wrote in January 1939, two months after Kristallnacht, and less than a year before the Nazis would invade Poland. Poetry, Auden said, “is a way of happening, a mouth.” The destruction that followed caused the poet to disavow many of his most famous poems and to edit out optimistic lines—“We must love one another or die” became “We must love one another and die.”

On her piece “Guardrail,” Haven Steel reflects, “The decision to end it in a hopeful place was one of the most important parts for me.” A hopeful ending is not the only choice an artist can make. This question is at the heart of “Interning in the Monitor Room”: in this world of suffering, is it better to live or die? 

In “Transgender’d Pastoral,” Paz Pacheco Hall writes, “ink was left / to our hands / so that we might share in the act of creation.” Maybe, in a world careering towards entropy, it is the creating itself that matters. I believe we are driven to pursue truth and beauty so that, as we work to save our world, we remind ourselves why it is worth saving. 

Shay McIntosh
Editor-in-Chief