Issue 148
Summer & Fall 2015
-
Issue 148 opens with Kelly Sears’ video essay “Pattern for Survival.” Sears juxtaposes militaristic, first aid, and fitness imagery with text from the US Army Survival Manual: “A key ingredient in any survival situation is the mental attitude of the individual(s) involved.” An ensemble of gifted authors study survival and the human experience throughout Issue 148. The fiction investigates characters’ mental attitudes when confronted with devastating circumstances. The poems examine snapshot-like moments imbued with both beauty and violence. The nonfiction observes life’s turning points and draws sense and order out of the small details of life. How do we survive being human? Through this mosaic of experiences, we begin to understand.
With Issue 148, we say good-bye and thank you to John Bresland, who inaugurated TQ's publication of video essays and cinepoems in Issue 141, and who has made TQ an important participant in that vibrant genre ever since. He's passing the torch to Kristen Radtke, whose "That Kind of Daughter" appeared in John's very first issue.
This summer, TriQuarterly began a complete upload of all 137 print issues of the magazine. Every cover and page of TQ’s entire history will soon be available to readers around the world. We are thrilled to share decades of ground-breaking fiction, nonfiction, and poetry without any cost to readers. Read our newest issue, or read our archive, but come on in and spend some time with TriQuarterly.
Cheers,
Adrienne Gunn
Managing Editor: Adrienne Gunn
Assistant Managing Editor: Noelle Havens
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Film Editor: John Bresland
Fiction Editors: Carrie Muehle, Ankur Thakkar, Stephanie Tran
Nonfiction Editor: Martha Holloway
Poetry Editor: Dane Hamann
Social Media Editor: Ankur Thakkar
Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
Media Architect: Harlan Wallach
Technical Advisors: Alex Miner, Rodolfo Vieira, Nick Gertonson
Staff: Ahsan Awan, Emily Barton, Jen Companik, Aaron DeLee, Jesse Eagle, Jeshua Enriquez, Dan Fliegel, Ish Harris-Wolff, Alex Higley, Barbara Tsai Jones, Katharine Kruse, Jen Lawrence, Robin Morrissey, Marina Mularz, Troy Parks, Lydia Pudzianowski, Nate Renie, Mark Rentfro, Paula Root, Caitlin Sellnow, Michi Smith, Adam Talaski, Myra Thompson, Ted Wesenberg
Image from Pattern for Survival
A Note on the Afterlife
I saw her in the shadows of the bar, peeking out from behind a column, watching us, the friends she’d left a moment earlier, “to freshen up,” she might have said, or was it to go outside for a smoke, or maybe to say hi to someone who’d just entered, someone the rest of us didn’t know?
A Note on Smell
The check had long since come, and he had paid it. And the restaurant now was empty but for the two of them and the last remaining waiters eyeing them angrily from the darkened far end of the room, all the other tables cleaned, the chairs upside down on the tables, and the floor mopped…
A Note on Manhood
You were still too little for the new bicycle I’d gotten you, but too big for the tricycle you still liked to ride, and so while the big bike stood unused in the driveway, you rode the tricycle around the cul-de-sac, knees banging on the handlebars, feet clumsily pedaling, happy to be too big for once for anything…
Note on Hell
Dublin, 1974
The car bomb had exploded not far from Trinity only a few days earlier, and the city was still largely on lockdown. Even the churches near the bomb sites were mostly empty.