6.1.2024
Hempstead, NY 

Welcome to lucky number seven! 

In thinking about this number, I couldn’t help but attempt to quantify it. This journal is assembled, edited, and produced by the Hofstra Publishing Studies capstone class each year, apart from issue 5, which took two years (thanks, Covid). That means with this issue, we’ve officially graduated two full cycles of Windmill capstone production classes out into the world. 

The Windmill class opens each year by exploring our previous issue, in what I hope is akin to the way a medical student might learn from a human body. We conduct anatomy exams to understand what makes the journal move, and consider its different parts, its strengths and weaknesses. Once we’ve completed the initial assessment, we move back to all our past issues; as our stack of published books grows this takes longer yet becomes no less important. The principles that guided our decisions (and missteps) in those earlier years remain our north stars, even if we’ve found new ways to express them. While the bones of the journal remain the same, each class finds ways to make their issue their own. 

Our previous issue (2022-2023), one of the most stunning we’ve produced, received high marks from our editorial board, with one exception: the team felt the tone was just too dark. The looming storm on the cover by Ashley Eliza Williams, the greyscale graphic memoir, the themes in the essays and stories, all felt ominous, they reported. Of course, this proved the Issue 6 editorial board succeeded, since they’d decided to deliberately sap the entire issue of color, a direct correlation to how we felt at the tail end of the pandemic.

This year, of course, was different in many ways: for the first time in four years, we worked without the extreme complications and strict requirements of the pandemic. However, as Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote: Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind. Covid’s shadow was certainly present—in paper costs, illnesses, absences, and masks, of course—but we were ready to shrug off the dark cloud, to lean toward the sun our bodies were craving. In an early editorial meeting about concept and cover, the Issue 7 team mocked up their guidepost image: a kitten holding a rainbow parasol and riding a unicycle. They wanted whimsy and wit, something bursting unabashedly with color and queerness and beauty and, above all, hope. I believe they delivered.

The cover image by Dinora Justice, a Brazilian artist working in Boston, explodes with the spirit of reclamation and sets the tone for the whole book. In her Portrait project, from which we included three images in our art section, Justice responds to painters such as Matisse, Ingres, and Delacroix by working with “iconic female figures of the Western canon” created during a period of “fascination with the exotic Middle East through paintings of odalisques, who were quasi-slave women kept in seclusion.” Her treatment forces “a visual relocation of the female form from the realm of the intimate to the universal” by returning them to the natural world. Heather Heckel’s site-specific paintings, also featured in our art section, extends this return-to-nature theme through work created during a National Park Service artist residency at the Marsh-Billing-Rockefeller National Historic Park in Woodstock, VT. By wending the trees through the park’s historic mansion, Heckel represented the “concept of family trees, as well as the trees that make up 80% of Vermont’s land.” (And her porcelain bunnies were a happy nod to our cat with a parasol hopes!) Our final artist, Arielle Trenk, came to our editorial board’s attention during a campus lecture on digital illustration and design. We chose her piece “Mexican Arch” to close our book because it feels like a magical gateway, a portal of some kind, reflective of the transformative nature we hope our issue exhibits.

As a journal housed in a Publishing Studies program, we are especially proud to open this issue with an electric conversation featuring YA author and advocate George M. Johnson, a Black non-binary writer whose memoir, All Boys Aren’t Blue, was the second-most banned in the country at the time they visited Hofstra University for our Great Writers, Great Readings event to commemorate National Banned Books Week. From there, our prose sections offer a range of styles, forms, lengths, and shapes, indicative of the many possibilities of each genre. In Creative Nonfiction, Liam Callanan’s essay “Care Packages” moved us all to tears with his luminous exploration of grief, while Jordan Brown’s recipe for “Grandma’s Potato Dish” felt like a new take on finding one’s place within a family. In our Fiction section, “Gearhead” by C.G. Dominguez tells the surprising tale of the unlikely couple of Georgia and Fernan who meet in a bicycle gang while Gavin Boyter introduces us to Charlie, a nightclub bouncer working days at the Charing Cross Road Book Emporium in “Bookshop Cop.” 

Special thanks go to InDesign whiz Julia De Lellis for her care and attention while working on Julie Lunde’s wild speculative story, “The Unfinished Business of René Daumal,” which imagines the possibilities for the final line of a manuscript. The experiment charmed us immediately, and we were proud to learn that we’d be publishing work from a fellow literary magazine editor.

We hope you find our new issue as consistent as the seven days of the week, as expansive as the seven continents, as whimsical as the seven wonders of the world, and as hopeful as the seven colors of the rainbow.

Onward!

Kelly McMasters