by Rebecca Cazanave
Sometimes semesters feel more like years than months. Sometimes the cold weather drags and motivation begins waning as early as January. Stepping into another semester of remote learning and social distancing on top of the typical winter doldrums, I expected pulling together another edition of Inscape to feel wearisome.
Under the best of circumstances, Inscape impresses me. From the hundreds of submissions we get, the hours our staff spends discussing each piece, and the care that goes into copyediting and formatting, every edition feels like a literal miracle rising out of the overwhelm of a semester.
This semester, however, Inscape inspired me. Despite emotional challenges, theses defenses for our genre editors, exhaustion, and manifold other difficulties, our team put in the time and effort to make something beautiful and to shine a spotlight on the artists that have made us think differently about life and the world.
A part of me wishes I could say something profound about this edition, about how we curated it or about the themes that stood out to us, but lately I’ve been thinking about the last lines of Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica.” It reads “A poem should not mean / But be” (ll. 23–24). I think the same can be said for an edition of Inscape.
So instead I’ll say thank you to our contributors for trusting us with their work and to our staff for fully investing. Inscape couldn’t be without you.
Rebecca Cazanave April 2021