Editor's Note: Fall 2017

Lily Scherlis

L: Four times a year, our printer deposits a mountain of

boxes in our front hall. We pull off the tape to get our hands

on the new issues, our glossy seasonal produce. Upstairs the

magazines are variously pored over, flipped through, tossed

on the ground, stacked on the tables, organized

chronologically one day and repurposed as coasters the

next. Every other cover bears a sticky purple ring of dried

wine like a bruise. Some of the boxes don’t get opened.

These migrate into a particular closet, and then, after a

decade, to a second closet across the hall, and then, at

twenty years of age, to the sad cement nook beneath the

basement stairs. Down there, dust and water form a paste

that glues the issues’ pages together. The ones that survive

stick around for a while: the rough paper of the early

Advocate’s pamphlets cohabitates in our bookshelves with

the smooth prismatic matte of the past decade. Our first

fifty volumes have retired to bound tomes. When we poke

through copies from the 90s, we imagine our predecessors

lounging around these very couches while we––the future

so-called collegiate literati––were napping in our baby

strollers. This fall, we’ve resurrected the glossy vibes of the

70s Advocate. Paper: slick. Spine: stapled. Content? Fresh.

L: A naturalization of the eerie, or exposing of the sinister?

A fall from grace, or a courageous leap? Was it said, or was

it embodied? Cyclical motion, or an arrest of momentum?

New England autumn points ambiguously to mortality and

vigor in the face of it, toward the moral and the sensorial,

forward and backwards. In this issue, the light and dark

consider their changing relationship. The retrospective

is constructed, and the new smiles back uncannily. And

featured contributors Sarah Nicholson and Jorge Olivera

Castillo publish work, for which we are extremely grateful.