Dear readers,
It is no secret that memory rarely moves in a straight line. Sometimes it’s a whisper, sometimes a wound, sometimes a ritual quietly repeated. The past resurfaces in fragments: in ink and print, in archive and reenactment, in the roles we play and the ones we resist. How, readers, do we hold onto the past, not so tightly that we cut off its circulation, but with enough resolve that it doesn’t slip completely from our grasp.
In this issue, authors look not only at what is remembered, but how: through texture, tone, silence, and trace. For our Culture Desk, Cameron Jones ’26 traces the quiet precision of Jonathan Edwards Pressmaster Jess Marsolais, who recollects his time in publishing, before he started teaching the craft of letterpress printing. Hudson Warm ’27 reviews Ava Reid’s Lady Macbeth, a fevered retelling that trades Shakespearean ambition for gothic dread, as protagonist Roscille navigates what’s left unsaid in patriarchy. Experimenting with the filmic aftermath of intimacy, Sarah Sun ’25 finds where confession becomes rumination, and love lingers in the small, domestic rituals
Finally, for the cover issue of this story, Angel Hu ’28 digs deep into the 70’s and 80’s archives of the Bloodroot Collective, where lesbian print culture and restaurant hospitality take root in radical acts of the everyday. Moving between the Yale archives and the Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant, she explores how feminist politics continue to resist erasure, instead broadening its networks across generations and geographies—even in the quiet suburbia of Westport, Connecticut.
Like Angel, we think about the anatomy of the Collective’s namesake flower—its sprawling, latticing rhizomes that have become the liberatory architecture of feminist politics. In these roots, we are reminded of how politics and memory often grow sideways, bringing us to another strange time.
Yours most daringly,
Connor Arakaki and Madelyn Dawson
