Editor's Note: Fall 2017
Lily Scherlis
Lev Mamuya
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.