Editor’s Note

By Achilles Fergus Seastrom

Editor-in-Chief, 2022-2023

Poised at new beginnings.

Beginnings always find me poised and uncertain on the brink. The knowledge that it is time to move and also that I have no idea how share intimate space in my mind. As we, the 2022-2023 Touchstone masthead, face the end of the semester and our final Touchstone publication, it seems to me that we should be looking towards a beginning. There is no more important part to the end than the place where we start again. Beginnings are also where we find the thoughts of this issue’s essays, stories, poems, and art.

In this issue, you will find work that adjoins the past with our attempts to move on. The daughter moves into a future without her mother and, nevertheless, carries her mother’s past with her in Megan Saunder’s essays “Kathy Kay” and “River in Egypt.” Accumulated tension of the past follows us into the present in “Alexandria” by Hunter Prichard. An old friend finds grief in the present, flowing in from the past in Carmelinda Scian’s “A Silver Jaguar.“ In “Kite” by Robert Stone we find the past is always with us, even the most distant past and even in our most current work.

Just as poems like “Just as Depression Starts to Let Up” by David B. Prather tell us how firmly the past can hold us, there is also art that shows us how to move forward. In Jacqueline Goldfinger’s “Gospel on the Radio,” we jump with a Cricket to find the “sweetness of the world.” In fact, you’ll find many poems in this issue that evoke the forward motion of the world like “Cactus” by Sierra Duffy and “Duplex: Origins” by D. Dina Friedman. Or look to AC Bohleber’s essay “Growing Out of It” to support a survivor living through and living onward.

And, of course, we find ourselves at beginnings no matter our fear or reservations. In this issue, intimacy is found in secrecy until it journeys boldly into the world in “Emily as Rabbit Fur” by Darren C. Demaree and “Jamboree” by Dwaine Rieves. We wake in a poet’s kitchen and are encouraged to drink our fill of our passions in “Turnover” by Lawrence Bridges. Walk through the world with a young woman who chooses beginnings even when the past calls her back in Emily Stedge’s essay “Someone’s Father.” Forgive yourself with Lisa Delan’s “Yom Kippur,” a poem that understands exactly how hard forgiving what came before can be.

We at Touchstone know how exciting and thrilling and difficult and unsettling new beginnings can be. Hopefully, wherever you are in your newest beginning, you find something here that resonates with your own journey. You can find a multitude of beginnings and journeys in our art, our poems, stories, and creative nonfiction essays, and in the beautiful creative work made by K-State’s own winners of the Touchstone Undergraduate Creative Writing Awards. As the members of our masthead move on to new beginnings, some of us taking new positions in Touchstone for the 2023-2024 year, others waving Touchstone goodbye, we’re glad you’re here with us at the beginning of all these things.