A Note from the Editor: Issue 39
We're back from summer break! With everything, as usual, in flux.
The last three months saw the PS team take a much-needed break, despite our sporadic publications of standalone pieces (like this! and this!). Running a publication with ambitious ethical goals, dreams of community and programming expansion, and then all the basic logistics and admin tasks of maintaining its upkeep, can take a massive toll on the body and mind. Ideas change, priorities shift, capacities wear down.
As an editor and one of the founders of Postscript, there are so many times where I have thought of giving up. That I could hover to the right button online and in a second, really, shut it all down.
My own hiatus took shape in the form of a phone call. I was speaking to my mother. I was struggling to find a day job at the time, to feel some kind of stability and trying to navigate the massive changing tides of each layer of my life while keeping negative coping mechanisms at bay. How could I keep pouring into Postscript when I felt so groundless and depleted? As I sat there with a sniffling face, looking blankly out my window with my mother’s Zoom connection fluttering like faulty wings, I tried simply to do just one thing: hear her.
My mother reminded me that Postscript is something larger than myself. That in three years, we have not only built a global community of creatives in conversation with each other through their work, but also become our own little internal community, frequently bickering over image sizes and stray commas and lost emails. Postscript is a body that is independent to mine, which is a hard thing to wrap your head around when you’ve it treated like an extension of you – I’m avoiding saying “child” here – for years now. Part of recognizing its independence is allowing Postscript to live as its own creature, its own being. There are so many other wonderful people beside me on the team to take care of it and to help it grow now. And with our current loose base in the UAE, we have also been so welcomed and nurtured by all the creative practitioners and supporters in our current “home” country as one of the few and only consistently operative literary journals in the nation. I feel, after this hiatus, like I can let go of the rope a little. And it’ll be okay. There are so many others ready to share the weight and indeed too, the lightness.
With this comeback in our Hiatus issue, like always, we have a huge range of poems, photography, essays, opinions, paintings, and more that interpret what the rupture, whether pleasant or painful or both, of a hiatus can mean. Sometimes it’s the rupture between gender boundaries. Sometime’s it’s learning how to heal. Sometimes it’s getting a haircut. Sometime’s it’s a very kind, gentle voice saying: “Get the fuck back up.”
With love, and so much more to come,
Vamika
