As my final issue as EIC of Harpur Palate, it felt appropriate to pull together not only my own thoughts on the issue, but the thoughts of my Genre Editors as well. I have been so honored to work with such an amazing team during my time as Editor in chief. Each semester I’ve felt myself grow, learning myself into the  role. This issue is no exception. I am proud of the dedication my editors have put into sincerely pouring through submissions, in selecting, editing, and approving pieces for inclusion. I am really in love with every part of this issue, and hope that you will feel similarly obsessed in partaking. Here are some reflections from this issue’s editors

Assistant fiction editor Alanah Simenkiewicz said…

The voices we’ve compiled this year in the fiction queue are all so distinct from each other, and it’s great to be able to have such a varied catalogue of submissions to choose from; even a lot of the pieces that don’t end up getting chosen have so much to offer in terms of variety, or sticky craft choices, or just an overall pleasant and entertaining read. Being able to take a break from the piles of school work I’d accumulated this semester to just sit down and read creative short stories was something I looked forward to, even if finding the time to do so was not particularly easy…

Assistant fiction editor, Ellie Noti, contributed the following…

…reading for Harpur Palate has humbled me with the immense talent and creativity I’ve come across. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about pieces I read months ago, it’s so cool to be subject to so many unique ideas. The way Steff Sirois’s “Shapeless Thing” captures such a specific aspect of childhood, Amanda Gaines’s “Use Me” and its harrowing take on womanhood: “…the girl body is always a performance of part-ness, of halves?” Each piece playing with identity and reality in a way that grabs and keeps reader attention, showing “you” the self… like funhouse mirror reflections—warped, unreal, undoubtedly personal and at the end of the day still a conception of “you”.

Finally, my CNF editor Suzanne Richardson shared such lovely thoughts on each piece that I couldn’t cut a word….

In the remarkable excerpt of Leah Umansky’s full-length memoir Delicate Machine she writes after HBO’s Westworld what world is this? and it’s a good question—one that all daring and inventive creative nonfiction seeks to answer in its own way. Umansky’s excerpt contends with this by describing the world she’s living in as a single woman living in New York City during COVID who is trying to get pregnant via artificial insemination and the media and literature she interacts with that helps guide her with hope through the choices and decisions she’s carrying out. What is a body? What is a hope? What is a child? What world is this? Jacqui Higgins-Dailey’s world in her piece “Grief: A Walking Meditation” is one where she comes to accept her life without children despite IVF attempts and contemplating adoption. She does her best to grieve and understand what her world looks like beyond that desire: “I am walking gently, holding my own hand; reparenting myself.” All the while, Jake Warren’s “Weekenders” shows us the world of his childhood which is caught between the households of his separated parents, their differing cultural identities, and how one discovers who they really are while being so between everything.

Sam New’s “imploding” shows us the inner world of a woman; how if you drill down into a moment, we are all boxes and layered experiences down, down, down, one moment to the next; how just by existing we encompass and carry everything that has come before. Similarly, Crystal Odelle self-investigates in her piece “Writing Out of Existence” a self-reckoning mixed with self-recognition, where the investigatory, and yet gentle and forgiving self-lens is mixed with intellectual prowess and critique of anti-trans culture. A piece that in a sense is undoing a self, and making/creating a self and understanding a self, and trying to understand a former self and the art we make when we know and understand ourselves less (and yet we always know, the art tells on us). 

In her world, Melissent Zumwalt writes about how class, who she is, and where she comes from is invisible and what it means to confront that truth and hold multiple outside assumptions about about herself and her experiences many years removed. Some of the worlds written about in issue 24.1 are already gone, changed forever, as Peter Ulanowicz describes in his after note about the parts of Ukraine he found what he calls “automatic family” in: “Since first writing this piece in late 2023, two of the landmarks I referenced have been significantly impacted. On March 26, 2024, Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge was destroyed when a cargo freighter collided with the bridge’s support, causing it to collapse into the water. Four days prior on March 22nd, the coal power plant that was visible from Kyrlos—Burshtyn TES—was severely damaged in a Russian missile strike.” 

Lydia Armstrong is in a world between birds and complicated men she loves who struggle with addiction. Her desire to understand their behaviors, their needs, their ways of being dominate her essay “Two Birds,” but her self-questioning about why they take up so much room and how is the true north in this piece. 

What world is this? Emma Paris answers that question by writing, “After a couple weeks, I tried on the label of lesbian for the first time.” Her careful handling of ecology and self brings us to a deeper understanding of how we make our place in the world and how worlds make us is written with wonderment  in “Rabbits.” 

All the world-making in this issue culminates in Shir Kehila’s Harpur Palate award-winning essay, “Severed Ties” where she writes with no easy answers about the close relationship her friend Mo shares with a convicted murderer, Orion. Shir puts a lot of pressure on the world we live in by asking us to hold multiple truths about people, how they make us feel, how connected we can be to them, and all the while still holding onto the terrible things they’re capable of. 

We are grateful for all the worlds our creative nonfiction contributors have written for us in issue 24.1 because they are now our worlds too. 

Much of my inspiration for the issue comes from the artwork we receive. It helps to form the visual identity of the issue, and speaks to concerns we are feeling as a community of liberal artists and creatives. I’m especially concerned with a move away from the solipsism that feels so at the heart of our inability to see one another as humans as opposed to policies. 

 Tomislav Šilipetar’s piece “Alter Ego #5” was the basis for the rest of the issue. To me the colors, texture, intimacy of this piece reinforce the bodily that drove selection of the rest of the art within the issue. It is so powerfully expressive as a start, and in this image, ’m thinking about the ways that we apportion and measure the body, the comparisons we make, and the pressures we are called to endure, the ways be bend, fold, contort, squeeze, prioritize, or make space for or other the human body. At it’s most basic a body is. It functions, takes in and expresses energy. A bodily constant, is change. In each I’m thinking about form, but also form in motion. In Janelle Cordero’s “Sand 1”  we contemplate… What does it mean to move, what movement is voluntary, What movement is sorrow, what movement is interior forced outward, and what movement is exterior acting itself upon body?

In this movement and form we recognize, identify with the abstract we have with shapes resemblant of human forms. A.J. Belmont’s “Confusion” embodies these associations. An artistic rendering of pareidolia. An effect where we see associations because we want to see them, or perhaps we have the innate need to find association. So, in this time when we are so distanced from a perceived reality, when the performance of self, and civility seems a foregone conclusion, as portrayed in Ronald Walker’s “Suburban Bliss.” Why should we not, as Jonathan Borthwick suggests, bury our “Heads in the Sand.” I originally placed this at the end of the collection, but it felt like such a stark end. Yes, there’s satire here, there’s humor,  but the thing I think we connect most to in this image, is the desperation for momentum. We are in these moments, days, terms, so in need of activity, that we find ourselves a bit worse for wear. Do you see yourself in this image? Where are you?

Jasper Glen’s “Ho Hum” feels like a face in conglomerated parts. Its sadness exists in the angles of its melted and muddied features. It presents itself as an amalgamation, a collage of preconstructed life artworks built perhaps of the trauma’s, joys, challenges encountered in the ways a being engages in the process of being. 

Cynthia Yachtman’s pieces Color Penenda Pende 2024 and Color Dekatesera 2024 feel elemental, cellular, a petri dish of sensation speaking a microscopic knowledge into our ears. Whispering the idea that we are at our core a collection of organisms, clinging in layers of tissue, creating flesh, bone , and body. Reminding us that at the present moment, our view must be scopic, centered on emulating the cohesion of unicellularity. In holding  solidarity together, we become. 

Janelle Cordero’s “Torso Study” communicates restlessness. The tension of the space that distances us from where we are, in conflict, and where we want to be, in stillness. An awaited state that we strive for. Have the courage to hope for. Kateryna Bortsova’s “Shards” for me encapsulates that strength. The personal ascendance over dueling expectations of bodies bothe feminized and otherwise. That in finding peace with a self, we have the potential to build outward, and find identity reflected. As depicted in Robin Young’s “I’ve seen a Face” We have the obligation to create the potential we need from our villages. In sending letters, in rallying at protests, in contributing time and resources to food banks, shelters, local initiatives and clinics. We are called to see the ways that we contribute to, and are constructed by our environments. We, as humans are Inextricably linked, and in many ways, that is a beautiful space for recognition.

With Warmth and Gratitude, 

The Editorial Team at Harpur Palate