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Issue IX Invited Essays and Stories
Issue IX Invited Essays and Stories
INTRODUCED BY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MARIANNE JANACK
Dreams, borders, learning, imagining other worlds and other ways of living—these are the themes that come up in the essays and poems we’re offering you this fall.
This issue is a collection of invited essays and submissions to our dialogue issue that we liked but didn’t really think fit with the dialogue theme. Martin Shuster’s personal essay is a meditation on the idea of borders—a fitting theme for a journal that aims to challenge the border between philosophical and creative writing. Martin is the Director of the Center for Geographies of Justice at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD. He is also Associate Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Judaic Studies and Justice there. Jacob Bortner-Hart’s personal essay is about being a philosophy student—what he wanted from studying philosophy; what he learned to not want from philosophy. It is also a story about being a student more generally, and how one thinks about their teachers. Marek Makowski’s poem “To Discourse Wonders: The Worker Speaks” is a creative/philosophical imagining of Bottom’s dream in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a way of drawing attention to the unsaid. Jamie Etheridge offers us a meditation on ants that reminds us of Kant’s distinction between noumena and phenomena—the way the world is independently of us, and the way it appears to us.
I would also like to take this time to thank and recognize the work of the students who have now graduated and who helped me start this journal, who have gone off to follow their own dreams, or at least to live a different life: Honor Allen, Henry Curcio, Riley Nichols, Dorothy Poucher, Kyra Richardson, Liam Rogers, and Corinne Russell. We will all miss their humor, camaraderie, imagination, and willingness to do the hard work of keeping the journal going. May their dreams, visions, and enlarged view of the world carry them far.