Readers, welcome to Issue 163 of TriQuarterly.

In the last couple of months, I’ve started practicing yoga. I put off cross-training the last few years, irrationally assuming it would inhibit my main focus, which is long-distance running. During bitter Chicago winters, it’s a challenge to get outside for a run, so I finally opened myself to a new activity. My yoga studio is a corporate chain where the instructors play repetitive beats over the PA system throughout each class. It’s not innovative by any means, but to me it is a revelation: it’s dedicated time to myself that I didn’t know that I needed. Other than my personal goals, there’s no competition for me in running or yoga, so why not find the benefit in doing both?

TriQuarterly was originally published three times yearly. It’s now published semiannually. Systems have to change if they’re going to work. Whitman’s often-quoted “I contain multitudes” holds some universal truth when it comes to creation. We can’t limit art to a single identity.

In the stories featured in Issue 163, people turn blue and talk to their wounds. A cult member negotiates the “real world”; another narrator provides instructions for handling a spouse turned imposter. Many of the writers featured in this issue are working in multiple mediums. Julia Specht, whose story “Sunlight” brings readers along on an arctic journey, often writes for film and the stage. In her essay “Bearing Witness,” DW McKinney incorporates logic charts regarding the function of air. Catherine Black de- and re-constructs part of her 2011 book, A Hard Gold Thread, as a video essay.

Like Black, Lisa Huffaker is reconstructing a text, into not another medium, but a different work. In creating a poem out of an existing text, Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin, Huffaker is both reproducing and transcending—repurposing—the original source text. While formatting the poems foo TriQuarterly, I asked Huffaker to create alt-text to make her work accessible to those using screen readers. Huffaker considered the source material and her intent creating these erasures in order to make the plain text within the images. By organizing the poem to, “The Eye is First of all, the means/by which a person sees/and only Secondly, the most/beautiful thing there Is,” Huffaker is making layers of art from art.

We have selected pieces that are ever-changing. I hope the writing in this issue stays with you and continues to evolve in your recollection.

— Joshua Bohnsack
Managing Editor: Joshua Bohnsack
Assistant Managing Editor: Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Social Media Editor: Emily Mirengoff
Film Editor: Sarah Minor
Fiction Editors: Patrick Bernhard, Jennifer Companik, Laura Joyce-Hubbard, Emily Mirengoff, Mariah Rigg
Nonfiction Editor: Starr Davis
Poetry Editor: Daniel Fliegel
Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
Technology Director: Ken Panko
Technical Advisors: Rodolfo Vieira, Natalie Roman, Garrett Gassensmith

Staff: Ally Ang, Amanda Dee, Amanda Vitale, Ashton Carlile, Becky Payne, Christopher Lombardom Corey Miller, Dane Hamann, Ellen Hainen, Emma Fuchs, Erika Carey, George Abraham, Gillian Barth, Holly Stovall, Ivis Whitright, Jackson McGrath, Jameka Williams, Jeremy Wilson, Jonathan Jones, Katana Smith, Kathryn O'Day, Liz Howey, Lydia Abedeen, Marcella Mencotti, Marissa Higgins, May Dugas, Megan Sullivan, Michaela Ritz, Michele Popadich, Morgan Eklund, Nimra Chohan, Puck Orabel, Rebecca van Laer, Salwa Halloway, Surya Milner, Susan Lerner, Suzanne Scanlon