A Letter from the Editors
Dear Reader,
We’re happy you’re here. This is the era that the novel coronavirus shuttered us into our homes and separated us from loved ones. This is the era that bore witness to the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and countless others. This is the era fascists stormed the U.S. Capitol and threatened the stability of “our democracy.” This is the era of sudden severances. We are in a constant state of whiplash.
In the wake of these events, we are met with many questions. How do we heal? How do we enact care? How can we create a space of collaboration, connection, and communication? A space in which we can process and document with immediacy as we stand at the center of an overwhelming amount of emergencies?
A place for us?
It is an urgent moment to strike.
Emergent Literary was born out of a Facetime call across three time zones during the summer of 2020. In a different sense, Emergent Literary also started as four friends sitting around a common room in college, craving collaboration. We seek to create what we needed then. We seek to incite conversation between disciplines, obscure the boundaries between genres, and let “literary” encompass so many different media. We want not to be gatekeepers but carriers of our communal torch. We hold true that the definition of amateur is “one who loves.” We insist on loving. We insist on rallying. We insist on being passionate.
This issue comes at the heels of emergency. It embodies care, the work of healing ourselves, the pain of memory and collective grief, inheritance, and what we pull out of our past in order to progress.
Welcome.