Welcome to our sixth issue of Windmill.

As our readers have come to expect, the work in these pages showcases a wide range of writers, from emerging to established, living near and far, from locations including Ohio and Iowa, Hawaii and Japan, and right here on Long Island. This issue, more than any other, we also expanded the boundaries of the types of work included in our pages. Before reading submissions, the editors made a dream-list of the types of pieces they hoped to find. For fiction, this included sci-fi, flash, new adult, and genre. For creative nonfiction, we hoped to find lyric, researched, and personal essay. I was heartened to look back at this list made so early on in the process and see that, indeed, this issue happily holds all of the above.

More firsts: both conversations adapted from Hofstra’s Great Writers, Great Readings series are with multi-genre writers. Between them, authors Larissa Pham and Joanna Rakoff have published in a myriad of forms, including: memoir, memoir-in-essay, novel, and novella, in addition to their criticism. We also re-invented our art section for this issue, choosing to highlight the work of one artist, in this case the deeply talented Hasanthika Sirisena, whose powerful comic documentary project “The Strip” is excerpted here.

Finally, this is the first issue produced in-person since 2019. Windmill is built each year as part of the Publishing Studies capstone course and I was relieved to hold our editorial meetings together in the same room again. Quickly, though, it was clear something had shifted. Like faculty everywhere, upon returning to in-person learning I’d found a mix of isolation, anxiety, PTSD, and depression at unprecedented levels in my classroom. But this felt different.

At one point, I asked the editors to brainstorm about this issue’s identity; we talked about what this year felt like for them and how this issue could respond. Maybe the color scheme should just be gray, one editor suggested. The group quickly concurred—a greyscale issue felt like a true visual representation of their post-pandemic existence. Everything felt grey to them now, they said plaintively. I just want to feel things again, said one editor. Some days, I worried the pandemic had sucked all the color out of their lives.

When it came time to choose the cover art, Ashley Eliza Williams’ image of a dark, heavy cloud felt immediately right—we debated whether this immensity was descending or lifting, bringing despair or hope. Or perhaps, we posited, it was just still, heaving and huge, and would never move. In her poem “What it Looks Like to Us and the Words We Use,” Ada Limon describes a conversation about the universe, nature, and the existence of God. The questions remain unsettled, and she writes:

So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,

its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name

though we knew they were really just clouds—

disorderly, marvelous, and ours.

This cloud—disorderly, marvelous, and ours—represented what this year felt like for our editorial board. Despite this feeling—or, perhaps, because of it—I couldn’t be more proud of the way this team came together. They supported each other in and out of the classroom with professionalism, grace, and (as the group photos on our final pages prove) humor.

I still don’t know if this cloud is bearing down on us or ascending. But I do know that the pieces in this issue succeeded in making us feel something, and we hope the same will be true for our readers.

With hope,

Kelly McMasters

Editor