Issue 161

Winter & Spring 2022

When I started working with TriQuarterly as a fiction reader in 2017, I didn’t know what I was looking for. Reading submissions, suggesting what work would be published in a literary journal that has been produced since 1958 became an overwhelming task. Fortunately, the entire issue archive is available freely on our website.

I have spent a lot of time digging through TriQuarterly’s digital archives, initially for inspiration to design announcements for new issues, award nominations, and conference swag. The more I browsed, the more I became enamored with the writing and and the art and the design. There are issues dedicated to science fiction (49), to prose from Spain (57), to Mexico (85), to Asian Literature (31), to Love/Hate (47), and our previous issue, to Black Voices (160). In the Festschrift for Edward Dahlberg (19) there is this photo from Ralph Eugene Meatyard, published two years before Meatyard’s death in 1972.

There is beautiful ephemera included in these back issues: calls for submissions in writing contests long since ended, advertisements for bookstores long since out of business, and the opportunity to purchase a TriQuarterly t-shirt by mailing $8 to an office building in Evanston. My personal favorite of these ads comes from Issue 5, in which the Booksellers Association of Greater Chicago took out a full page calling for donations to bookseller, Paul Romaine, who was fined $1000 after a sting, for selling the 18th century novel Fanny Hill to an undercover cop.

There are stories in the margins on these back issues. There are stories connecting people across places, across time. The writing and videos in this issue continues this tradition. Anney Bolgiano’s essay “The Best Pedagogical Way” channels Kafka through his industrial pamphlet “Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines.” The collective “we” in Ghassan Zeineddine’s “Speedoman” contemplate assimilation and the public pool. In “EI Silencio” by Sergio Reyes, he offers us a necessary reflection on silence in grief. In the first of what I hope will become a new series, Ed Roberson’s “PORTRAIT PORTRAITURE” is available as a digital chapbook. These and every piece here are building something.

In my first issue as managing editor at TriQuarterly, I realize we can never live up to this journal’s history, but rather, are contributing to this journal’s future. I am fortunate to have worked with such predecessors as Aram Mrjoian (Issues 157-160) and Carrie Muehle (Issues 153-156) as managing editors before me, who set the tone for quality and innovation.

I still don’t always know what I am looking for, but thanks to the dedication of TriQuarterly’s editors and submissions readers, the patience of Northwestern’s tech team, the guidance of Susan Harris and Reginald Gibbons, and the collaboration of the writers, I am certain we will find it together.

All the best,
Joshua Bohnsack
Managing Editor

Managing Editor: Joshua Bohnsack
Assistant Managing Editor: Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Film Editor: Sarah Minor
Fiction Editors: Vanessa Chan, Jennifer Companik, Erin Branning Keogh, Emily Mirengoff, Laura Joyce-Hubbard
Nonfiction Editor: Starr Davis
Poetry Editor: Daniel Fliegel
Social Media Editor: Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
Media Architect: Harlan Wallach
Technical Advisors: Alex Miner, Rodolfo Vieira, Nick Gertonson

Staff: Adrienne Rozells, Amanda Vitale, April Yee, Ashton Carlile, Amanda Dee, Becky Payne, Cecilia Rabess, Christopher Lombardo, Corey Miller, Dane Hamann, Elijah Patten, Ellen Hainen, Emma Fuchs, Erika Carey, Gillian Barth, Grace Musante, Holly Stovall, Ivis Whitright, Jameka Williams, Jonathan Jones, Laura Humble, Katana Smith, Kira Tucker, Liz Howey, Marcella Mencotti, Matthew Richardson, Megan Sullivan, Michaela Ritz, Michele Popadich, Miranda Garbaciak, ML Chan, Morgan Eklund, Myra Thompson, Nimra Chohan, Patrick Bernhard, Prince Bush, Puck Orabel, Rebecca van Laer, Susan Lerner, Suzanne Scanlon

Image from The Inventors

Maria Zoccola 1/15/22 Maria Zoccola 1/15/22

self-portrait as rip current

the body the body the mind
and then the body
lord save us from these fisher

Kalani Pickhart 1/15/22 Kalani Pickhart 1/15/22

Propinquity

He measured things—all things. I pictured that he took a tape out and drew notch to notch from end to end, even though it didn’t work that way. The drawings on paper he laid on the table before us were ideas. The database was building, online.

Minyoung Lee 1/15/22 Minyoung Lee 1/15/22

Sing a Song of Sixpence

If Jenn were a table, she’d be solid mahogany, much like the rest of the furniture in this stereotype of an open-floor-plan space. Except Dan could feel her chest heaving against him, her ribcage pressing into his flesh.

Kelsey Norris 1/15/22 Kelsey Norris 1/15/22

Stitch

They talk around the horror. For as long as they can stand it, they talk about stamina, the races they’d been training for, about their weekly mileage, their best split.

Silas House 1/15/22 Silas House 1/15/22

Neon Moon

If he can make it through February, he’ll be all right. That’s what Joel thinks, all during the wintertime. If he can make it through December, like that old Merle Haggard song David had loved.

Katie Devine 1/15/22 Katie Devine 1/15/22

House of Wax

He had asked her to have drinks in the wax-figure-themed bar attached to the movie theater, though they’re not seeing a movie and though, she will discover, he does not drink. He lives in the same building, on the thirteenth floor, he told her in their early messages, and still manages to be twenty-five minutes late.

Ghassan Zeineddine 1/15/22 Ghassan Zeineddine 1/15/22

Speedoman

We were in the jacuzzi when Speedoman entered the pool area and our lives. There were five of us, all sitting spaced apart, the warm water bubbling up to our hairy chests. Outside, it was gray and snowing, the roads icy.

Adrienne Celt 1/15/22 Adrienne Celt 1/15/22

Can You Forgive Me?

The receptionist, Esther, was in a bad mood, and complaining to the dental hygienist about a string of canceled appointments. “Why can’t people just let us know if they’re not coming in?” she asked. “We only ask for twenty-four hours’ notice: it’s not that hard. I’m just trying to plan a day here, people.”

Kristin Keane 1/15/22 Kristin Keane 1/15/22

Expecting

It sounds, at first, like a bird. The way birds sound. Caws and chirps and trills. Occasionally, the tree will shimmy in the place it has made its home. The leaves will rustle to indicate there is an animal inside the tree.

Kathleen Rooney 1/15/22 Kathleen Rooney 1/15/22

With the Face to the Rear, in the Direction Behind

The last day of April, showers and all. A clammy rain that’s less than refreshing. Water wrung from a mildewed sponge.

The fog slips the city into a dress made of gauze. Wildlife plops itself onto lawns.

S.J. Killebrew 1/15/22 S.J. Killebrew 1/15/22

Waiting

I am sitting on a blue chair in a New York City public school classroom in The Bronx staring at a Chromebook screen on a student desk caught in the chilly cross-breeze between the ceiling-high open windows and the open classroom door and I am waiting for my students to show up online and I am trying not to die.