Tesserae 2025

Rowland Hall

TESSERAE

TESSERAE

Volume 20, 2025

Tesserae are tiny stones or pieces of glass cut to the desired shapes to use in mosaics. With the shimmer of reflected light, tesserae work together to create a sense of the hieratic, a Byzantine method of representation that gives the effect of the super-natural, dissolving matter and leaving the light of the spirit. The mosaics in the church of St. Mark’s in Venice use tesserae to form an interior space that is otherworldly.

Front Cover: Log, Mackenzie White, Gouache

Left Page: Butterflies, Songtsen Sok-Choekore, Acrylic and Marker

Dedicated to Celebrate the Careers of:

Molly Lewis – Ceramics and Science Teacher

Ingrid Gustavson – Upper School Principal

Over the last 30 years, Molly Lewis has worn many hats at Rowland Hall. Originally teaching 6th grade science, she was many students’ first introduction to secondary science. Five years ago, Molly transitioned to teach ceramics electives for middle and upper school students. Well-loved by faculty and students, We will miss Molly next year and wish her luck in her retirement.

“I would not have succeeded in other science classes without her.”

“Molly consistently makes sure I had support even when I wasn’t taking her classes.”

“Molly has been a constant source of creativity and a calmpresence for students. She has given so much, inspiring projects that challenged students to look at the world through a new lens, and imparting wisdom and wildness through clay; she will be missed.”

Over the past nine school years, Ingrid has been the face of the Upper School, leading the school through the struggles of learning while in COVID isolation and overseeing the success of over 300 students annually. Tesserae thanks her for her support over the years and wishes her luck in her future endevours.

Here’s what faculty and students had to say about Ingrid:

“Ingrid leads by example and is truly a servent leader.”

“She is the most kind, caring, administrator that I’ve ever worked with in my 35+ years of teaching.”

“I

don’t think I will ever work for someone else who will empower me to be the best teacher I can be like she does.”

“Someday

I hope I can be like her.”

Lion

Kylie Seamans Charcoal

Beginning in 2019, Tesserae offers our magazine contents in a digital format. To visit our website, scan this page’s QR code or manually navigate to rowlandhall.org/tesserae.

I“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Heron Kaia Brickson

Acrylic on Canvas Panel

Rocky

Kendra Larson

Mountain Laurel River-footed, she twisted against red bark, granite sand wet with rusted water.

Once she spoke with the cadence of echos, throwing yellow petals to the sister stars, color dwarfed by sleek moon silver.

She still washed her skin of Leucippus, spear tip dipped in scarlet gilia, arms scrubbed raw like aspen bark.

She learned to outrun the elk, Bare feet light along tundra rocks, arrow tipped with yarrow, sharpened with alpine thistle.

She did not want your affections, poured along ridgelines, caught by winds. She hid in your sister’s domain, your harsh rays unfamiliar to wet moss and the undersides of leaves.

Could you not hear her screams as they crashed against boulders like waterfalls, mica gleaming in your fury? Could you only hear your lyre, polemonium music choking your ears?

She knew her mortal limbs could not outrun your sky-wide stride, her lips, blue tinted, her last defense. Did you watch her tears turn to sap, legs sink into dirt, hair sprawl into leaves, pupils become fruit laden?

Tesserae

Rowland Hall

She still watches you, shade her little defiance. She still rebukes your honors, shudders when men in search of your glory, lay calloused hands onto her trunk and sing of their great deeds.

Do you still sing of lead as you pull verdant branches to turn your frenzy gold-tipped? Or do you only sing of lupine, columbine, iris, to her wind-swept fury?

Have you watched the women pull the dark laurel fruit from her boughs, mouths twisting with bitter juice, seeds strewn in manzanita?

You remain laurel bound, hear her whispers smoke and curl with the wind, echoed screams and waterfalls.

Concealed Rebirth

Tenzin Sivukpa Acrylic Paint, Ink, & Gel Pen

The Sea Like The Womb

Bronwyn Andrus

In the corner of my mind lies a place that holds in its cold, sandy hands, my soft, decorated wrists. I stand on the beach, pulling and pushing like the moon with the tide, some kind of strange magnet that keeps me yearning for the depths bellowing below me.

Water crashes against my ankles my feet exposed in my sandals, water pooling in unoccupied space. I walk farther into the waves, chanting: Sea, swallow me. Bring me home. The home dark like the womb from which I came. My body like driftwood, drenched floats, limp in the water where I lie, waiting to sink, and soak into the cold blue. Warmth escapes from my skin, unlike the safe red flesh that held me before.

Oyster

Ruby McMaster Oil on Panel

Early Winter at Cat’s Pond

Milo Van Ispelen

Sharp thorns latch onto me as you did two nights ago, overripe blackberries crushed beneath our hasty, bare feet, staining them the color of the necklace you wore around your neck.

We didn’t mean to fall into the pond that night, just as you didn’t mean to reach out and pet the wild cat we’d found following us, its eyes as ebony as the speckled sky engulfing its silent limbs, its fur scattered with thin lines that mirrored the ones etched into your back–the things you wouldn’t say.

The frigid air sent tiny bumps up and down your arms–I’d tried to smooth your skin with my own but only sent small tremors through you, through both of us. We stopped abruptly as a group of siskin flew overhead, and you laughed to their chittering song.

The dirt beneath our shivering bodies was lush and lusting for things only animals dreamed of, sprinting, sprawling as the children that had brought us here did, when the trees painted themselves tangy hues of crimson and rust, too many months ago.

Now the frost-tipped leaves lie frozen in place where we’d left them, as we knew the pond would freeze just as the cat would after we left to find home.

Rowland Hall

Light

Jay Lutton Ink

What Do You Remember About The Earth?

Sabina Lowe

I remember we watched as new snow covered old, dull layers that had not yet melted. We took the dog outside to play and huddled for warmth as the small ice crystals landed on our eyelashes. We flew down the icy slopes

As my hair whipped against the wind. We jumped over the small creek creating an obstacle in our path as we attempted to reach the top of the mountain. What I remember is not the truth anymore. Although we wish to turn back time, The mistake we made long ago cannot be unmade. Today, we see a smoggy haze covering the blue sky, We see an unrecognizable parched climate

Our arid landscape makes for tangerine flames

That steals our trees, plants, and homes right from under us. Our great lake, once described as salty or smelly, has departed from the valley, leaving in its place illness and pain. Young people, who do not remember the same earth that I do, branded with the mistakes of the past that others made for them.

So I try to remember the best that I can But it will never feel the same as it once was.

Kingfisher

Kaia Brickson Acrylic on Canvas

Scape Ashlyn Lieberman Oil on Canvas Paper

Woods Lake, Colorado

Isabel Himhoff

Flax Gold

Aspen leaves welcome a stranger into a false landscape, flutter, and fall into a palm until the world tears, the smell of cool shade sucked from the air. Inhale, and dust invades the throat to clog all orifices. All that is dry remains. Cattle wander, caked in cracked mud, lazily grazing on rolling hills of gold grasses, which cower to a punishing wind, a dance of reaching and receding against control. Wispy dried ribbons hiss at my arrival in a tongue only the most ancient can respond in. The dappled mare greets solitude, hair, course against the hand, swish, flick, against a constant itch of irritation.

Deep Pine

Dark pine logs layer slanted cabins, the lean, a tell of age spent deepening into molasses squeezed between levels of vanilla cream, rich chocolate cake sliced, the Interior, spiced with stories of lost relatives, faces frayed and stained from time, The glossy–green wood stove crackling appreciation through a rusted metal door. Firelight pops, crisp sparks competing with creaking warped windows, the forgotten quilt remembered, a patchwork of cranberry and pine swallows its wearer in the scent of warmth and amber musk. Hummingbirds flit, feathers iridescent. Drowsy eyes follow fractions behind, proof in the vibrations buried in the stomach. Lakeweed reaching upwards in tendrils, twisting fingers from murky depths. Invisible fish sway in the languid

current. Trout scales bending, catching speckled sunlight off each plate’s edge, a spectrum of olive, ivory, and peach. Tree branches, arms leadened with growth, raise wooden boughs to salute or shelter. Shadows devour land as sunlight recedes. Liquid dark masks the face in the clammy cold. Wind plays dark needles into sharp melodies. A sudden crack snaps the neck towards the fallen branch behind.

Lavender Sigh

Dusk arrives in smooth undulation against the skin. The unbroken hum of insects, a harmony of wings, mimics the intensity of an absent charge. Glassy ripples reflect the curvature of sky across imperceptible polished facets. Mist descends across water, cloaking sight in blurry cloth pulled taut with straining fingers to reveal the entirety of nothing. Swollen clouds clash in aerial battle bleeding rain from open gashes. The water, an uneven caress, each drop resonates inside the head, striking against the skull. The shrouded Rocky Mountains expel an echoing boom of dislodged slate crumbling down slick rock. Dried brittle wildflowers hang from above the door. emitting sickly sweet perfume to calm reverberations pulsing against my ribs. I crush a bead of wild lavender between the index and thumb to resist chaos. Inhale and rest in the certainty of no man’s control. The metallic taste of storm invades the mouth, Thunder possesses me in each deafening surge, Bones buried in flesh shudder at each display. A mortal is loneliest dwelling on insignificance.

Dots

Kendall Kanarowski Acrylic and Water Color

Little Monkey

Ada Tyser

My parents called me “little monkey” when I was a kid. I would climb whatever and wherever to get as high as I could go. On hikes, my brother and I sought out those pieces of venerated rock that lay like discarded fragments of copper mountain, posing a quiet challenge. We would nag my parents to let us stop, inspecting each side of a red boulder for footholds and handholds to show us the path to the top. My parents’ only rule was that we had to get up by ourselves; they thought if we couldn’t do it all on our own, then we wouldn’t be able to get back down without help. Because of the added difficulty, the triumph found at the top was that much more rewarding.

I loved the challenge of climbing boulders, but my favorite things to climb were the towering trees. We discovered pine trees in Sugar House Park that reach over fifty feet tall, and offer branches that form a path perfectly suited to bear an eight-year-old body’s weight. I can still remember the nervous bracing of my body against gnarled wood, my breath quickening in the rich, pine-scented air. I found myself twenty, then twenty-five, and thirty

feet above the ground, as I looked down at my mother through the canopy of green below, embracing the thrill. I loved that I had faced a challenge and risen to it, loved the goosebumps decorating my skin and hyper-awareness of myself in space, the vividness of the golden sun through the canopy and the overwhelming pine scent that mingles with the elation from having mastered my fear. I loved that feeling that caused me to look up into the sun through branches above and say, more.

Tunnel

Gemma Ciriello Ink on Paper

Bugambilia

Paulina Ize-Cedillo

Brilliant chincuete skirt, large and open, countless layers of purple, immense, and breathtaking. Spinning in circles, mesmerizing the crowd. If it weren’t for your bright yellow heels, I’d think you were floating.

Up away from this messy world, where phones are stolen from people’s pockets, just as people are taken from off the street, families left broken, once I had a sister, she disappeared the moment the car trunk slammed close.

Gradually you fall, because the rules of gravity apply to a celestial.

An irreplaceable ache comes over me when you aren’t around, I think you know how much I need you. When I’m gone, will you still make everything okay? Will your petals still be ready to embrace me?

Mira mija, there is nothing more pure than you. Close your eyes when the rain falls, when the roads flood and traffic builds up. The cars will come to a stop. Double-check the locks.

Beauty underestimates you, brings out color in the streets, green and purple dancing around broken grey walls. Humidity has destroyed the houses, their paint is peeled and moldy. No matter what people do, no matter how hard your vines try to hold the walls up, they are always falling apart.

Intimidating are the razor security wires that go over the cement walls covering every side of the houses. You match the wires with the little swords you hold close. Wrapped around your fingers, the small daggers remain hidden until they cut. Hidden are the keyholes under your voluminous skirt, many are the keys needed to open the gates to each house.

Light boldens the mosquitoes caught in the mosquito nets, keeping them from the thing they want the most. Nutrition, love, and community. Wanting is one thing, achieving one’s wish is another. Trapped, the mosquitos are unable to move, kept in their own square cubicle, though unable to leave at 5. All they wanted was something better than what they had.

In my dreams light pours into my room, the window is open. There are no locks. You are floating around my room. Little flickers of purple across my walls, swaying to an invisible song, you turn from side to side, I wish to dance just like how you do. You are my warm and welcome good morning. As you fall, the darkness takes over. Seeping through the corners and swiftly covering the rest of the room. The dust that is constantly being chased away returns, carrying with it more pain than before, I can’t escape the darkness, but you can.

A shimmering light shines through the darkness that you are. The galaxy that spins in the blink of an eye, a universe the size of a palm, a story as delicate as a tear, a whisper so quiet only those who care can hear, bright blinding colors, yellow and purple as you hit the ground.

Peace

Evan Weinstein Photography

Silent Petals

Kendra Larson

I used to think death was a silent thing: my great-grandmother died in a cascade, her breath stuttering between throat and the dim lit hospital room in Layton.

I can’t recall whether she or the elk died first. The elk died loudly too, witnessed by owls, mountain lions, scrub oak browning in Wasatch winds. The elk laid its head between the two trunks of a maple, legs splayed beneath its grey-brown hide. A mountain lion stalked it down the hill side, nose twitching with the scent of blood. Teeth bared, it bit silently into brown fur, its yellowed muzzle turned to mimic fall maples, white bone mixing into granite.

All I remember is the hole left so openly it became indecent, resting place of crows and snakes.

Can death be over mulled, misshapen by the folds of a hand and left to brew like sun tea on a midsummer porch?

If so, I worry one day I will forget death’s sound, the holes it digs into the chests of its witnesses, that I will remember only the silence between the rings of a telephone twisting

between fourteeners, glaciers, ponderosa forests, vanilla bark flaking onto mica-rich granite.

The ringing lingers over that graveyard in Ogden where three graves lie open, reserved, waiting with earthworms and saline dust for our bones, mahogany and oak, to sink and touch bedrock. Then the ringing, the abrupt silence, rushes towards us, pausing briefly to exhale, push open the door, Then yell not yet, it worked, he would have but...

My grandmother tells of how my grandfather’s heart is breaking, broken, how it broke over 200 times per minute, how his grandfather’s broke too.

Will I see my heart strewn like wild roses between waist high grass? See my heart shatter like their seeds, red made pale under a blue sky?

Elk

Kaia Brickson Charcoal

“‘Hope’

is the thing with feathers... I’ve heard it in the chillest landAnd on the strangest Sea— Yet— never—in Extremity, It asked a crumb—of me.

—Emily Dickinson

Rowland Hall

Owl

Tenzin Sivukpa

White Charcoal on Black Paper

Tomorrow

Emma Hare

I won’t understand my worth until I’m gone. The days sink faster, as if they don’t belong. My time here is running low, a dying match. I reach out to the people, but my fingers burn. Through time and distance, we lost our connection. The memories linger, a quiet Reminder we must be apart.

Sand slips through my hands, The tighter I hold, the more I lose. I grasp what matters. Faces, names. Tomorrow’s weight feels solemn, a burden that looms. Resting heavy on my shoulders. A piece of me is missing, lost in the tide, Waves thrashing around me. It is already too late.

I keep quiet thoughts in my head. The need for silence grows louder, harder to bear, A constant reminder.

Life isn’t fair. Have I done Enough, loved enough, Accomplished enough, been kind enough? But regret tugs at my heart, Time and time again.

I prepare for the end, no definite day, No checklist, but one thing in my mind, Moments I once took for granted. I hope they find comfort when they say my name, I will live in their hearts, through joy and pain. In the grief, there will be comfort, Tears will fall, but let them be for my life, Not just the loss, and although I may fade, I will never be gone. My existence is just a moment, an idea.

I leave behind a trail of sorrow

Muddied and foggy, Narrow and never–ending. I can’t stay, but leaving is hard. I wane, the end of a day. A never–ending thread, Weak and frayed. In the end, I will find peace.

Do not cry when I’m gone.

Birthday

Mackenzie White Charcoal

Searching for Belonging

Fanni Ventilla

Flying in the airplane, no memories, tiny nails dig into soft flesh. Worry and doubt feeding insomnia I arrive—

America, a land of freedom, yet I find myself chained by my past. Words, friends, places left behind.

A new life beginning, filled with confusion. No one understands me, an alien.

Days soaked in loneliness, emotions rolling down the walls, pouring with a deep tone, like blood in the channels of benumbed veins. The baby’s wails echo the pounding of my hollow heart.

Confused looks follow as I stutter, scraping together the few words I know. Silence pins me hard choking me like a collar. Restricted words claw at my chest: I have so much to say, yet I cannot utter a single word like a child mumbling gibberish.

The cycle starts again, learning how to belong in this foreign place. I understand only the familiar rhythm of nature by day, the moon is my beacon by night, my inner sun will burn.

Life is a spiral, forever searching for a home just beyond my reach.

Final Approach

Evan Weinstein

Photography

I Hate Books

Avalon O’Connell

I didn’t always hate books. My first favorite was Percy Jackson and The Olympians, The Sea of Monsters in particular. I discovered the series by searching for more stories like The Odyssey. I longed for more, even then. My favorite of the books was The Sea of Monsters, maybe because I was proud to understand the allusions or perhaps it was the lure of adventure, of magic. Now, I am certain it was the latter. Magic compelled me to read; even hidden away in a cozy crevice of my childhood home, the world had seemed bright and boundless. Stories were berries ripe and ready to be ripped from their stems.

As I aged, the possibility for my own adventures waned. No letter came by owl at eleven. No satyr brought me to a magical camp at twelve. I was desperate at thirteen. In the coming years, when the glow of childhood dwindled, when the tooth fairy stopped visiting, when the lack of magic left a hollow world in its place, stories were no longer enough. They had never really been enough to begin with. Later, when I picked up my former favorite, The Sea of Monsters, Tantalus became uncomfortably familiar: cursed to starve surrounded by fruit, wither while water was just beneath his feet. I understood the feeling. I read about princesses turned assassins, peasants made warriors, worlds overflowing with the magic I so desperately coveted. It was not real, stories simply paper in my hands, fruit withering beneath my touch.

So I loathe the fruit I cannot reach, drown in water I cannot drink. But even then, the double–edged sword will always gleam brightest. I will never reach what I wish for most,

yet it will forever surround me, underneath my feet, a hair’s breadth from my fingertips. Maybe that’s enough.

Home

Ruby McMaster Oil on Canvas

My Can of Mace

Isla McMahon

2 months ago, you arrived in my mailbox. 2 months ago, I asked my mum for a reason I really had to carry you around. 2 months ago I shrieked, “I’m only fourteen” to her. 2 months ago, I glared into your unwelcoming fuchsia frame and wondered why I would ever need you. 2 months ago, I shelved you to dress in dust, never intending to pick you back up.

1 month and 2 weeks ago, I gripped your bitter husk in my soft, child’s, hand as I shivered my way down the sidewalk. 1 month and 2 weeks ago, you replaced my coat. The only protection I need now burns craters in my pocket. 1 month and 2 weeks ago, I surged with fear, endured the whistles. As I slipped away, the words “don’t show them your fear,” screeched in my ear. 1 month and 2 weeks ago, I uncapped you for the first time.

1 month ago, the sensation of water overflowed my lungs, unmistakable, as I prayed to no god to keep me safe. 1 month ago, my eyes blistered with bitter tears that marred my face. 1 month ago, I curled into myself, echoes of cat calls booming in my ears. 1 month ago, even the warmth of my bed couldn’t console me, only you, settled in by my side could comfort me. 1 month ago I decided I loathed construction workers. 1 month ago I hurled that mint–green tank top into my closet, its crumpled soft fabric wrecked by my tears, shelved like you once were.

2 weeks ago, I left you rested by my collection of tank tops–the ones I won’t wear–the ones too small to be safe. 2 weeks ago, I blissfully left the house, oblivious. 2 weeks ago, I clutched onto nothing as I longed for you, wished for you to appear on me, impossible as it was. 2 weeks ago, I began to cherish the burning sensation you brought when I had you. 2 weeks ago, I named you. 2 weeks ago, I decided you meant more than I realized.

Yesterday, I didn’t once think of you. Yesterday, I lay in my bed, for once, with no memories too hard to ponder. Yesterday you became a habit–wallet, keys, phone, you. Yesterday, I finally went on my walk again. Yesterday, I adorned you in bright shining rhinestones, the crown you deserve, so the next time I use you, it will be in style. Yesterday I didn’t regret tightening my grip on you as a man I would have been terrified of two months earlier, schlepped by. Yesterday, I laid you in your bed as I returned, feeling safe for once, to mine.

Daily Essentials

Gemma Ciriello

Acrylic Paint

Mixed Berry Pies

Elli Ramirez

“And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.” - Gabrielle Zevin

I Ponder the idea of belonging To my roots, To my ancestors.

The dirt under my nails Moves from generation to generation Once belonging to my ancestors

Stuck in internment camps,

Enslaved until their bodies gave up, Until their bodies no longer worked.

Why was I born this way?

With tainted skin, Tan not white, Colored not blank, Coming home and Seeing your child drawing On all the walls Becoming colored, Perfect no more,

Looking in the mirror And seeing an unrecognizable face. That’s not me, I’m not different.

gaze at the colored walls, Desperately trying to wash them.

I peer into the pond, Narcissus looking back at me Trying to become blank, The more I want to return

The body that was scanned And purchased, With the barcode carved into my skin.

The systemic problems I face leave a trace, The planet I call Home, dying.

The pie I bake is Mixed, cherry and blueberry, Two different things.

It doesn’t make the dessert better; It just makes it wrong, Too different.

In combining two things You made less than one, Nothing, no more.

The stares as you walk down the street burn. Why do they burn? Why do they stare?

Never understanding until it is Too late, you can never be normal, Born lesser than.

Turn this page of the book. Get out of the colored girls story, Pushing the struggle to the back

What you don’t know won’t kill you, It will kill; It just might not kill you.

I’m screaming and crying, But no one comes to save me. No one even stops to listen. I’m just a ruined canvas.

Eyes Bailey Bowman Prismacolor on Black Paper

Mirror Mirror

Isabel Himoff

Marble veins on an unfeeling statue mirror the lattice behind my eyelids.

Stone eyes unseeing of cut perfection, my flesh consistently contradicts what I want to see, heavy, bloated with self-invoked horror, unspoken words sinking towards loathing.

Heavy, too heavy to pull myself up through suffocating pressure, squeezed with every swallow of my throat.

I stop swallowing, rise until only my eyes feel heavy, the rest of me light, freeing feeling until fingers turn bony and the spine protrudes like teeth bursting through the skin. Hide my body with baggy clothes no matter what shape It isn’t my own.

The mirror becomes the eyes of everyone else. I’m taught that my appearance means vanity, That caring is selfish.

The blue eyes that watch me no longer smile.

Zombie Tenzin Sivukpa White Charcoal on Black Drawing Paper

Running Free

Greta Fillippone

My golden retriever and I weave through Liberty Park, winding through the pathways, her joy infectious as we pass scattered homeless camps. Long stretches of slightly overgrown grass cover the entire park, with large, blooming trees scattered throughout, creating a beautiful display of flora. Men linger along the running paths, their aggressive gazes fixed as my dog and I run. All are at least five years my senior. Some flock together in groups, pointing and nodding in my direction. They sit on benches, lean against trees. Sunglasses rest low on their faces, hiding their eyes, but I feel their gaze follow me as I pass. Their attention hangs in the air, heavy and unnerving, and I can’t shake the feeling that they expect something from me. Their stares burn into my back, oppressive and invasive. Goosebumps rise on my skin as my awareness sharpens. My dog doesn’t care, sprinting, dragging me along. Free and happy, she runs in peace. As we pass more people, I tighten her leash, wrapping it around my wrist. I’m holding her back; she sees it as restraint, but I see it as self-preservation. She doesn’t understand—she wants to run, and I want to run away. Men like these exist everywhere; it’s impossible to avoid them.

Moments with them blemish my childhood, burdened by lewd remarks, catcalls, yelling, whistling, disgusting words thrown like buckets of mud, clinging to my skin, impossible to wash off. Harassment stains you, stealing childhood innocence and exchanging it for the heavy weight of unwanted attention. My dog pulls ahead, oblivious to my tension. As we walk home, I wait for the disgust to fade. It lingers, a shadow I carry with me—something I cannot escape, no matter where I run.

Dog

Kaia Brickson

Acrylic on Canvas

Present

Sylvia Rae Twahirwa

Descending into the sauna of my mind, where the neurons fire,

Airy here, as I swim into the embrace of breath,

Nourishing every hollow pocket in my anatomy,

Close to convulsing, and with an exhale, returned,

Enclosed in an electric void.

Dopamine is a friend to my vacant shell,

Another distant voice guiding me through the walls,

Needy for your instruction as you play me to the beat of my pulse,

Careful and calculated, I track your movements longingly,

Effortlessly, I slip into the hands that hold my beating heart,

Deep into the dark, I try not to fade– my eyelids flicker,

A buzz that brings me past peace,

Nobody is with me, yet everyone is here.

Can anyone hear what bubbles,

Energetic and too full and with too many feelings to feel,

Delicate silence bends and folds as my lungs gasp,

Accepting that the floor has caged me in the softwood.

Nerves glaze over the tops of toes and out of heads–overwhelming the room.

Can I have enough of what I wasn’t intentionally looking for, find me presently in meditation?

Encore.

Dancer

Ruby McMaster Oil on Canvas Panel

The Apricot Tree

Kendra Larson

My Grandma calls it popcorn. White petals shoot from a dark branch, last snow light on the Oquirrhs.

Once I watched a finch, red–breast flinching with unfamiliar anger, flinging it up the branch, pull flowers by their stem, strewn, shredded paper, against dark mulch.

Its flowers recede; leaves stab into mid-spring wind, rustles hiding green stones, perfect for skipping.

Two springs ago, my dad and I hurled young apricots, fingers sticky, green skin splintering down the middle, tearing under our nails.

Green fruit turns speckled, yellow splattered like the last rains of spring? It anticipates its framed mountain’s form, sunned yellow’s defeat of green.

I pull a fruit from its pair, brush dust from fuzz, and my thumbs split the apricot, juice rolling down my fingers. I watch a white worm emerge from beneath a stone seed, flesh browned, and it rolls from my fingers.

Yellowjackets swarm at the end of August. Fallen fruit, nectar laden, becomes their feast. They dip their bodies into apricot skin, buzzing fury sounding through leaves.

I turn my eyes, half dried, to raindrops, tear ducts filling alongside aqueducts. I forgot how rain traces lines through dust–covered windows, dirt–speckled legs.

It is fading now, rain reminding leaves of fall’s fickleness, freeze on the tip of sunrise. Branches, outstretched, turn black in these mid-morning twilights.

I think I must steal its verdant summers. Apricots gone by October, and yet my skin still burns red like smoke sunsets and red-rock mesas cast in iron sunlight.

Garden

Asher Orenstein

Acrylic on Canvas Paper

Burnout

Greta Filippone

I am surrounded by others working, typing nonstop. Blue light glares from my screen, burning through my eyes, sending, waves of pain radiating through my temples. I hear keys clicking; fingers dancing over glowing letters but my own refuse to move.

I’m paralyzed, limbs held captive, iron welded to my wrists. It bites into my skin, heavy and relentless. I used to move with ease, thoughts fluid, dancing through life, a fire full of motivation. Academically bright, told I’m naturally smart. My flame now flickers.

Clacking computers echo around me. Undecided words stabbing the folds of my brain, knowing what I should write, yet I don’t move a muscle. My peers type incessantly, a blaze lit beneath their hands, burning bright. They know what they’re doing, they’re who I should be.

Why can’t I write?

I am not restrained by anything but my mind.

No longer erudite, I am average, blending into the masses. I embody the shadow of my potential, rippling over desks and books, going through the motions, transparent and absent, lost in a sea of could-be’s.

Labeled as gifted,

shoved into AP courses, but engulfed, trapped by expectations. I know how I should be moving. My fingers float above the keys, never making contact as if the letters might burn me.

I stare through my screen, seeing nothing but my reflection glaring back. I’m losing myself in my notes as I sink into mediocrity. I exhale, air rushing out of my lungs, and I watch as water floods, Stifling the flame once within me, Finally extinguished.

Blu

Mattie Sullivan Prismacolor on Toned Paper

Flashbacks

Sylvia Rae Twahirwa

The early chapters of softness, jubilant.

A simplicity yearned for, again and again, grasping for the quiet times.

In dreamland, on nights when I do dream, I remember, feeling.

Rereading my biography, dusty, I cough; I choke, and cuddle, with those foreign words, rereading with a lost lens,

cramming myself into the margins, ruining the uniform print.

My eyes scan over the present, new connections and congratulations.

My new perspective, quite pessimistic, like little Jiminy Cricket, went dark, rereading, I ask myself, prosperity or destruction, I grasp the future, so clearly, like a shackle, like a promise. Running, against a clock that ticks not, running, from your label, one that I don’t even want engraved into my heart, though the mind does not control the heart.

I flashback to times of serenity, Knowing that what I knew, I know no longer, But if I run fast enough, I might make it there.

Growth Portrait

Ruby McMaster Mixed Media

Beginnings and Endings

Pia Piccoli

I will begin where I end.

From my mother’s womb, born two weeks too late. To my ultimate death in some retirement home, Years later.

I will begin where the tides collide. Almost to the finish line, almost accomplished. The waves push me forward, dragging me down. I come up short, unaccomplished.

I will begin where love ends. Sitting in purgatory between light and dark, learning from my thoughts Shaming my mistakes, praising my accomplishments. Watching myself grow.

I will begin where a new life blossoms. A bridge between child and adult, a world of playdates and work schedules, becoming what I fear and what I long for. What I can never become.

I will begin now. With each sunrise, I undertake a new path. Through sickness and in health, every moment with you. Till death do I part.

I will begin later, “Why not tomorrow” the thought echos, “Maybe even never.” Knowing that no matter what I do, no matter how I do it, It will never be enough to begin.

I decide when to begin. I am the only one gifted that power, And I keep beginning a never-ending cycle. Beginnings, but never an End.

Glow

Jay Lutton

Prismacolor on Paper

“If you want to draw the bird, you must become the bird.”

–Hokusai Sisters

McMaster Oil on Wood Panel

Ruby

III

Rowland Hall

Bury Me At Roaring Fork River

Isabel Himoff

Black oil spills from hollow eyes, leaking tears of disgust, for who could love a girl whose flaws turn the blade against herself, whose claws rake the soft skin for relief in ruby and fears,

a coward, scared to die but wishing to be gone. Pillows stained with pain each night. No one knows. Who would think to check on the girl who shows a smile for anyone, almost real but stitched or drawn,

onto the face, hurts her cheeks, a reminder, of the snake inside strangling the heart, a vice turning veins to rust and skin pale, to chart her body as a map of the hurt inside her.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but all of her’s have seen her curl up and disappear. Her meaning in this world is unclear. She stays to see her eyes get darker as her vision blurs.

Bury me at Roaring Fork River, a shred of paper, undeserving of her words, peach tree, to veil me from the birds, not ready to die, to forgive her.

Desert roses grow from the sliver of scars and smiles of clear water. Oil and rust dissolve into laughter. Bury us at Roaring Fork River.

Arch Ashlyn Lieberman Oil on Canvas Panel

When a Mother Finally Breaks

Miles Bauer

It’s not unfamiliar; there’s always a man somewhere who can’t be bothered and leaves his wife to manage everything at home, then demands to have more kin—a man who just wants to form more of himself. But doesn’t want to put the effort into raising them; he’s only interested in other women and various substances, a woman who has to handle the clones of the man she can’t stand but also can’t bring herself to leave, a mother who can’t look at her children without a feeling of disgust and resentment. When will she crack–she must eventually–under all the pressure of keeping

her many children and husband entertained while gaining nothing in return? When will she start to lock herself up in her mind and leave her children to fend for themselves? When will it become so much that they must move in with someone else? Someone who can finally take these reminders of her self-loathing off her hands while her “husband” lives his dreams after ruining hers? Will it be after 3, 4, or perhaps 5 children? When one child finally becomes responsible enough to care for the others that the mother can’t handle anymore. Eventually, it will break, and everything will crumble.

Figure Reckoning with the Cosmos

Jay Lutton

Nemesis’ Warning

Bronwyn Andrus

You walk the same path as Narcissus, falling and sinking into the same filthy, vanity-ridden pond. You will drown here without empathy, without telling me the truth. My hands cannot save you. They can’t hold you away from righteous punishment. You think you’re swimming in your pride, gluttony, and greed, but the water is cold. The day is dark, and you are dying here.

Your heart is missing; it was torn away from you at birth, and you never wanted it back, believing it was a blessing. Now you are indebted to me for life. You must pay back the time you stole. This debt is to be paid through the burdens of guilt.

As I stand on the flowering marsh, glaring harshly down at you, you try to crawl close to the edge. You look afraid. The hourglass of time you owe slows you down, The sand is too heavy to hold. Despite the fear in your eyes, you are content. You would rather die than face the court of law in my eyes.

You hate me because I deserve justice, you hate that it’s yours to deliver, yet you take a foolish stance in the face of fairness. The mirror of dark water that you look through will ripple and shake under the pressure of your vicious gaze. You may regret everything with wild excess, but you have no right to forget I loved you.

Moon

Stella Morasch

Mixed Media: Collage

Garlic

Grey Obermark

I will wake and find God again, let Him run His barbed wire fingertips over the soft flesh on the inside of my cheek, leave whatever scars He wishes. I will wait and find him again, man leaning in the back alley, smoking cigarettes, who will breathe fire into my lungs and crush me with the side of his knife like garlic, like I’m garlic and something violence makes better and not worse.

In my dreams, I lie on his brown sofa and tell him about the visions I have of God, how they’re tinctured with scarring. I wake in blood, watch him search my body for empty cavities where he can store his violence, tens of sharp and pulsing stones. I do not pull away from anything, not even what hurts me, so when he cuts me open he will look into the red and pain and not understand that I want anything more than this.

Hand

Lucy Dahl

Black & White Charcoal Pencils

230 Minutes Wasted for a

Face in the Window

Mia Zhang

Every week I spend 230 minutes in the car, that’s 230 minutes with my headphones on, 828000 seconds of debating with my dad and 3.83 hours taken out of my week. Time wasted. I sit in the passenger seat with my foot up on my chair and watch cars go by, one after the other. Headlights flash before they pass me. Out of the 10080 minutes in a week, I waste 230 minutes searching for a face in a window.

The changing green, yellow, and red lights streak around the faces in windows. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to bypass the tinted glass concealing a boy my age I’d notice his hair, warm, auburn, long, and falling past his shoulders.

I watch the waves of rock brown and bleached steaks, Never-ending and never-knowing paths Reaching for nothing, before the world goes green

At the next red light, I’ll search for another face. I’ll be able to make out a man in the driver’s seat, worry carved into his skin and hands while red light douses his eyes. His reflective glasses and his silent speech eerily emphasized the red light that wrinkled around his tired and aged face. I watched the ripples of red Weave around him Until the world goes green.

The GPS tells us to go right.

I’ll catch a glimpse of a college-age girl silently laughing at her phone.

I’d watch her type with one hand. Her phone casts a ghastly light on her face Her hand on the steering wheel, stiff and neglected The car in question was bright pink and dented on the back right door. I hope I don’t see her face in the news, The headline reading: “COLLEGE STUDENT HITS TRUCK ON I-15”. The picture below it would show a bright pink car next to a gray truck, warped and distorted from its original state, And covered in red light I made a quiet promise to myself that I’d never text and drive.

We speed up onto I-15 and I watch for faces in the cars. My eye floats over to a rough-looking man, perhaps in his 50s, clouding his gray truck with tobacco fumes. I tell my mom I saw a guy smoking in his truck. She made me promise never to smoke.

I watch the sky go dark and the city lights play pretend, faking as artificial starlight. A black motorcycle flies past my window. Ignoring any speed limits as the acceleration of euphoria ends with the chance of a deafening crash. My mom tries to make me agree that this behavior was dangerous, unruly, even insane. I choose not to say anything

I catch a glimpse of a girl my age in my window. She looked just a little tired, just a little angry, sterilized brown eyes buried in a warmer shade of eyeshadow and sharp eyeliner messily smudged on the right side. The headphones press her dark, unruly, rebellious hair down, cut with no care and dirty kitchen scissors. I saw angry red spots that painted her skin. Looking down, I saw them trace from her neck and shoulders down to her thighs. Red spots caused from showers too hot for her body. The water would burn too hot

making it impossible to get the cold, dirty oil out of her hair and skin. Despite her desperate attempts, she knows it’ll never come off, so she’ll cover them in silly doodles with permanent markers.

My baby brother asks where we are going. I don’t say anything. He asks another five times again “where we goin?” I know he’ll keep asking, and there won’t be anything I can do. I put my headphones back on, listening to whatever pops up on my queue for another 3.83 hours I ignore my brothers screaming, crying, and laughing at cartoons They’ve watched 17 times over. Instead I’ll think about how long I have to sit in this car . Out of 10080 minutes in a week, I’ll spend 230 minutes searching for faces in car windows. 230 minutes wasted.

Subway

Ruby McMaster Oil on Canvas

Palestinian Soil

Sophia Hijjawi

Tata’s bones are not buried in Jaffa, but something died there in silence. What she left behind in razed dirt are sisters, home, and tirades tamped down by enemy boots.

Her truth cannot defend home, only define it, shed light on red and blue people, whose hands drip viscera.

If reality remained fossilized, I could wear red and white and green, walk down black streets, no leering or jabbing or jeering or whispers when I draw close, no tilting from the stench of buried tears lingering In the curve of my nose, the texture of my hair.

Her dissolving calcium is itchy silence, rough as unworn wool.

I dig for her truth, lost at five in ‘47, deep under Israeli pavers.

New rubble awakens malice, a beast that trails me as I track my homeland’s dust through the streets, seething gazes grasping at my coattails, spitting accusations of who I really am.

I retreat over bloodstained soil, patriotism dirtying my hands, smelling iron beneath stage makeup, awake in a world no longer deafeningly silent. Now, gunshots crack and bombs overshadow screams minutes and miles and oceans away, as loud as crimson streets and the blood in my teeth.

Tesserae

Rowland Hall

Inferno

Dylan Johnson de Lacy Mixed Media, Charcoal and Acrylic

The Lady by the Edge of the Lake

Paulina Ize-Cedillo

Through the veil of darkness, a lady walks by the edge of a lake.

She cries for the child she will never have. She used to remember the time she almost had one, but now she doesn’t think. The moon torments her, smiling. She knows that during the day they don’t exist.

Tethered to the earth, she can not go to the land of dreams. She only remembers her mission.

She calls to her children, crying. She doesn’t want to hurt them. She doesn’t even notice but suddenly she drowns them.

She prays for help but she isn’t alive. No one can help her. Every night she cries and cries and cries.

If you dare look for her, I will tell you how. Listen carefully: go to the woods. Lose yourself within the trees. Follow the sound of water, and when the night comes, you will find her,

dressed in a white dress her hair, long and loose at the edge of the lake, surrounded by trees, whose branches are long and thin, ready to grab you.

At the edge of the lake fog covers the ground, so walk carefully. You never know what may be lurking.

The moon took her son and her husband took her life. She spends her nights looking for the spirit of her son to take him to the land of dreams.

La llorona cries so much she can’t see. If you aren’t careful, she will take you there too. Be careful. I will see you there.

Skulls

Jay Lutton

Black and White Charcoal on Black Paper

Pomegranates

Lucy Dahl

Watercolor

Tesserae

Cascade

Evan Weinstein

The world never stops moving, Earth forever rotating, weather systems continuing to form, from sunlight heating the crust unevenly, homes will be destroyed in floods, lost to the water, lives forever changed from the ashes of the next forest fire. Yet, people will still say, everything happens for a reason.

The butterfly effect will agree with this sentiment. Everything happens because of something else, not because of some godly supernatural trigger though. No, instead from forces imposed by every action, every choice starting another new reaction.

Why are we the way that we are?

We were raised in our families, with our traditions, impacted by our friends who each lived their own lives, lives which have intersected, first impressions leaving marks as we learn to live for the first time with those around us.

I make instant ramen by cracking the twice noodles before boiling because that’s what my parents did. I knock in the same pattern before entering a room as my sibling does. The picture I took that sparked my love of photography, only taken because my friend told me to go with him to the airport.

What if I never joined a robotics team? I might have never met the people who I went to frisbee practice with for three years, never met my partner, never learned CAD. Would I still be applying to the same colleges, be on the same path? Countless choices, all happening because of the first one, yet somehow that exact sequence happened, creating me.

Computational Rendering of Proteins presented in Blender and Chimera

C. albincans Ras-1 in Glass and Light

Eli Hatton

Tesserae

Always Crashing the Same Car

Grey Obermark

“I was always looking left and right, but I’m always crashing in the same car”

-David Bowie

When I was a kid I used to see you in my dreams, and we were always getting into car crashes, the blurry stone bridge, and you and I on top of it, driving quick and reckless like we are two people who aren’t even in love. You’d never make a sound as the bridge crumbled from beneath us, and I’d jerk awake, words pressing insistently against my lips.

I said that “we are all moving on even if we are not moving forward,” because I knew it was what you wanted to hear.

Rowland Hall

Uncrashed Bug

Evan Weinstein

Photography

Memories Beneath The Aspen Grove

Mina Bailey

-For Pam

The aspen was her tree. The tall watercolor trees, yellow painted leaves, and ash black spots were as if a dalmatian had been crossed with this magnificent species. It always was her tree, Pam’s tree, my grandmother’s tree. A younger woman, tall, brunette, and a love for her grandchildren. She had two, but just two; my sister and I were young and dumb; my aunt never had kids, so she was stuck with me and Yara. Although we were a handful, she always had a love for every living thing in this world, her grandchildren, and the aspen.

The aspen is the largest living organism in the state of Utah. Its roots spread miles upon miles, reaching for each other, holding one another dear, and close. What I would give to hold her close once more. She passed away when I was about five years old, but I always remembered the gleam in her eyes as she stared at these trees. This was always an unforgettable look of complete amazement that lives in me, and as I grew up, I remembered this look.

My first high school trip with my classmates would be one to remember. We walked up this zig-zagged hill like the mountain’s zipper, draped along the winding trail, covered in the fallen brush of pines. I wish I could be an aspen, my roots connected to others, grounding me, and holding my trunk in turbulent winds. I could live without fear of the unknown. I could grow in the

highest of altitudes where no other dares to grow, live through the fire that burns all life, all, but not me I will thrive.

As we continued to trek through the fallen trunks, I believed we were in an endless loop of needles and raspberry bushes. The raspberry bush offered delectable fruit to anyone daring enough to endure its thorns. Maybe if I were an aspen, I would be unbothered by the pain of the raspberry’s thorns, and I would ignore the sticky, dripping, liquid gold sap pouring from my wounds. The bushes are covered in leaves of pear yellow and sage green. Hints of ruby red at the tips and stems, it looks as if the leaves were painted with my grandmother’s lipstick. Their fruit, the raspberry, a deceiving little thing, even the brightest are the most sour. As we bite into the manipulation of each berry, my eyes close, my cheeks quench, and my jaw tenses; the acidity seeps into my taste buds, reacting with my saliva, making my tongue sting with pain. But when I opened my eyes and looked up at the aspen trees, the berry tasted a little less sour. My jaw didn’t hurt as much, and my finger had stopped bleeding.

Continuing to hike in the pines, we found ourselves wandering, wandering into the meadow, the vast open field of aspens, their roots spreading under my feet like a secret you told that one girl in gym class. Wide and open, I stared at the tree that once was my

childhood, the memory of her, and my grandmother’s tree. We were told to pick one. My classmates sprinted towards the largest tree they could see, I just waited. I closed my eyes, took a breath, and then looked for an aspen. Its eyes have hundreds of deep black holes to stare into.

isn’t everything the unknown? I never really understood the concept of death until my grandmother got sick, but when I walked into this pasture, my questions were answered. She was there. She was the aspen. She was its leaves, its trunk, its roots. She was here to unify and con-

The same hole that I look to now is the same where my grandmother lies, but no, not one place; she is spread across the vast ecosystem, her soul within the ocean, her bones beneath the trees. Her heart lies with my memory, our lineage within the soil, wrapping and weaving in and out. We are all connected.

The aspen’s white bone bark was like skin peeled off its bones, exposing what lies beneath the unknown. The unknown for me was whether she was really still here. Does she watch over me, like the aspen watches its seedling grow? Does she still fight, like the aspen fights through the fires? And does she still love, like the aspen loves its neighbor? The unknown frightens me because

nect them. So as I stand in this field looking at her tree, I realize why they were her favorite. They are the bond for living organisms, they thrive off of the regeneration of their kind. That is what she was. She wanted to watch me thrive so she could thrive, pass on her legacy like the fallen aspen becoming home to the fungi. She is the link that drives my future, and there I was staring at the tree that never really was, its roots connected like veins, pumping nutrients throughout the soil. I wish there was a moment where I could be as connected to her again as close to her as the aspens are to each other.

Land Tenzin Sivukpa Acrylic on canvas

Stipple

Jay Lutton

Ink on Paper

Mockery

Isabel Himoff

We stare in mockery at those who don’t meet expectations.

The statement of shattered goals crushed beneath the weight of judgment by the slave of our gaze. You don’t expect the mockery until it creeps into your reddening face and heated blood.

Mockery grabs you by the hair and forces you outside your body to watch from the crowd.

The gasp from your lips echoes through stagnant space. You stand alone. Alone, as the laughter and bright eyes turn to find their next victim, their next slave to perform for the world. And the act of confidence you wrapped around your shaking shoulders crumbles by the threadbare seams, so tight before.

The act of playing their game lies in ruin at your feet.

“I

have found one explanation that seems to satisfy people. I tell them it’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

–E.L. Doctorow

Rowland Hall

Clocks

Sarah Gibbons

Acrylic on Paper

I Hate to Break It to You, but the Future Doesn’t Exist

Thea DeBellis

To whomever might also be feeling slightly unfulfilled, Will we look back on our lives satisfied that we lived them to the fullest?

“What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future.” - Martin Seligman and John Tierney, The New York Times

Ironically, one of the very characteristics that makes us human can also lead to our greatest downfall.

Eckhart Tolle says it perfectly: “People don’t realize that now is all there ever is; there is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind.”

Until recently, I had been anticipating my whole life. But then I realized I am already 17 years in.

The scariest question I always come back to is: How much of my life have I genuinely lived?

You’ve been so focused on wanting more, and that’s okay. I am guilty of the same. Have you ever realized that childhood is so special because we don’t have to carry the weight of the future? Because no matter how much I try to distract myself, my childhood is ending.

Any of our worlds could be completely flipped upside down. Someone we love could die. We could make a massive mistake. We could have an identity crisis. We could die.

Imagine that you are on your deathbed and realize that you never enjoyed where you were in the moment, lost trying to meet the horizon at the edge of the earth, except you never reach the horizon because it moves with you.

Your future is the horizon. When you reach the spot on the horizon you set out to see one year from now, it becomes your today.

The horizon always moves, and so will you. You will never reach the future.

Instead of letting the future paralyze us, let it guide us to be more present and value our individual actions more.

“Your new life is going to cost you your old one.” - Brianna West I recently realized that throughout high school, I had been so focused on getting into college and the newfound freedom included, but

Rowland Hall

within seconds, I was filled with regret, regret that I had not enjoyed high school more.

Who’s to say I don’t regret letting other events in my life pass me by?

Well, me.

I am exhausted from continually stressing my way through each day because I don’t know what will happen in the future. So, I won’t do it anymore.

I suggest you don’t either.

Instead, check in with yourself at the end of the day. Did you enjoy the parts of your life existing in the present, or did you fantasize about a future in which you can finally be happy?

The good and the bad are both necessary. Personally, I choose to be happy now.

Sincerely,

Thea DeBellis

Gummy Valentine Evan Weinstein Photography

Lineage

Sophia Hijawi

Charcoal

Rowland Hall

An Open Letter to Multiracial Children

Sophia Lieskovan

I know you. I’ve been one of you: confused multiracial child, the rosecheeked “solution” to racism, identity crisis-bedecked teenager. I am you.

Multiracials are becoming one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in America. In the span of the ten years following 2010, the multiracial population grew by 276%. We now represent 10% of America’s population. An optimistic research study even indicated that one in five people in 2050 may be mixed race. Our future seems golden.

But here’s some darker statistics: 35.2% of multiracial adults have mental health conditions. Incidence of severe major depressive episodes are highest among children of more than one race.

But why is this?

Monoraciality has always been the standard. Since the dawn of time, ingroup loyalty has been pivotal to our survival as the human race. It comes as no surprise, then, that interbreeding is seen as an utmost betrayal. As Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof condenses: “a bird may love a fish, but where would they build a home together?” Multiraciality is complicated. These borders extend even beyond mankind. Ever been described as mulish—stubborn as a mule? Ever heard “mutt” snarled at an innocent mixed-breed dog at the shelter? But the loyalty that protected cavemen from snarling wolves acts only as the basis for discrimination in our modern age. No wonder mixed kids are exhausted.

At fifteen years old—a typical teenager—I treated “halfie allegations” with terrified disdain. My hurt American father watched as I discarded my Californian roots and embraced the monoracial Chinese community. I dyed my golden-brown hair a blotchy black. I accentuated the tiny accent my toddler years in China had forged in my voice. I mean—I even considered not pursuing a relationship because I was afraid I would seem even more white. That’s crazy!

So I know it’s hard. I do.

But I’m not here to complain. I’m done treating my mixed heritage as an Achilles heel. By cowering behind the shield of passing monoraciality, you dishonor your individuality.

I don’t want to give you the age-old advice:

“Don’t take things so personally.”

“You’re a bridge between cultures!” “Love yourself.”

It’s not that easy. But start with this: stop trying to fit into the restrictions of monoraciality. Stop letting their words spur you into hopeless inaction.

At fifteen, I was an insecure little girl. I was angry and lost. I let the words of four racist aunties determine my identity.

No more.

So try to think of it this way: we are not 50% and 50%. We are not a dash of this and a pint of that. We are 100% two, three, four ways. We are all in one.

I wish I could tell you the world will change. I wish I could untangle your DNA. I wish I could tell you that you don’t have to change to accommodate the world.

But I can’t. I won’t lie. So all I can do is tell you to brace yourself until the world is ready.

A formerly-bewildered halfie, Sophie

Pack Hunting

Jay Lutton

Acrylic on Canvas

Dear Utah’s Jewish Community,

Evan Weinstein

There are around 6500 Jewish people in our state, making up a grand twotenths of a percent. To be fair, however, Utah isn’t known for its Jewish population. We are a small community with only ten faith leaders covering the whole state. As hate against Jewish people seems to be rising nationwide on all sides of the political aisle, sitting around is no longer an option.

Utah is unique in that most of the hate isn’t from a place of bigotry; rather, it comes from a place of ignorance. Better education is necessary, and—being one of the few non-Christian faith groups in Utah—it is currently lacking.

Action must be taken to better educate our state’s people about Jewish and other non-Christian practices.

Growing up Jewish in Utah, I experienced my fair share of mispronounced holidays and ignorant, inappropriate questions. As a third grader, it felt like a failure of the educational system when I corrected my teacher’s lesson on Chanukah. Yet, importantly, she was trying.

While better education can help curb ignorant antisemitic practices, it doesn’t come with an immediate effect. Additionally, the work that must be done to create better education would realistically require extensive changes to the public school system’s curriculum. Not only would this be a huge endeavor, but it seems less and less likely in the changing political landscape as a whole. Of course, even if it could be done, and learning about Jewish holidays and different non-Christian practices and beliefs was integrated into schooling, it would be an expensive, extensive campaign.

The recent war in the Gaza Strip has ignited a new space for antisemitic practices. While I believe that most of the politically charged action on both sides of the conflict has been without hate towards Jewish or Muslim people owing solely to their religion, there is no denying the spike in defamation and threats of terror to places of worship across the country since the war began.

On the whole, we as a Jewish community must do a better job of understanding and teaching the next generation about Israel’s history.

Going through weekly religious school since kindergarten, I loved learning how to read and write in Hebrew, make Challah (culturally Jewish braided bread), and learn about different biblical interpretations and arguments from the Torah. Of course, I also began learning about the Holocaust and other similar historical events. While I understand that there was only a fraction of the time necessary to give justice to covering any conflict, we still managed to talk about the intifadas.

I firmly believe that failing to learn about the colonial roots of the Israeli state which we celebrate annually with hundreds of cheap plastic flags is detri-

mental to the next generation of Jewish people.

My goal is not to say that Israel is bad or evil. My goal, rather, is to say that when we’re teaching students about equally heavy topics in religious school, we should cover both the evils and the virtues.

In second grade, when I looked at the 20-year-old maps lining the classroom walls, I wondered why the Golan Heights were shown as Israeli yet separated from the rest of Israel; I was never taught the answer. As a fourth grader, I understood that Israel didn’t exist before 1948, but I was never taught what existed before. And, it took a meeting with my rabbi in 10th grade to first hear about positive Israeli and Palestinian relations.

If we do not teach ourselves and our children about the full stories and complexities, it will inevitably cause damage. When we’ve been taught that Israel is an incredible entity as a beacon of positivity and that Palestinians are inherently antisemitic, it is inevitable that when someone opposes Israel or supports a Palestinian cause, it will cause tensions to rise. As tensions escalate, it is unsurprising to see acts of hate and terror increasing in both directions.

When, as a group of people, we are seen as a community that unequivocally supports Israel, it becomes increasingly difficult to build positive connections with Utah’s other non-Christian faith communities, like the Utah Muslim communities, who are also facing similar hate.

I am not arguing that Utah’s Jewish community should not “Stand with Israel” or “Stand with Palestine,” to borrow language from protests and political action across the country. I’m arguing that we need to do better with teaching ourselves; when our bias gets in the way of much-needed progress and community building with other marginalized groups in Utah, it will inevitably lead to an increase in violence in both directions. We must stop fighting fire with fire and instead work to make ourselves more understanding, empathetic, and willing to create meaningful relationships.

Sincerely, Evan Weinstein A Jewish High School Senior

Strung Arches Kendall Kanarowski Mixed Media: Cut Paper, String, & Water Color

Dear People Who Think that Human

Beings Can be Viruses,

Anna Lui

The virus may be new, but the loathing you feel is not.

You claim the country is “contaminated,” but when has it ever been pure? This place you claim to own, this so-called melting pot, renders individuality down to what you deem desirable. The evidence can be seen in the laws: The Naturalization Act of 1790, the Alien Sedition Acts of 1798, and the National Origins Act of 1924. The list goes on, but the message is clear: not everyone is welcome.

You claim we threaten the “purity” of Anglo-Saxon culture despite eating our food and cherry-picking from our cultures. You claim we threaten the economy despite immigrants accounting for nearly 18.6% of the U.S. civilian workforce. You call us “lazy” and “mooching” off social services, even as immigrant men participate in the workforce at a significantly higher rate than those who were born here. Yet you still demand that we “speak English or go home.” This land was never yours to begin with.

You call us viruses: infectious, serious consequences, liabilities. I remember one night walking with friends across a dimly lit street as a group of men passed, smirking. Uncomfortable, we continued. I held my breath in anticipation as the sound came: “Korean or Chinese?” My body locked up. The rest of the exchange was a blur— slurs, a joke about raping the girls in our group, some as young as eight. My friend grabbed my arm and whispered, “It is not worth it,” mistaking my fear for conviction. We returned to our hotel shaken. Only then does the numbness break into fury and grief.

This act was not random but instead a symptom of a culture that views people as inhuman and disposable. The symptom of a country that weaponizes deportation raids, revoking student visas, and stationed ICE officers at elementary schools.

The definition of a virus is a large group of submicroscopic infectious agents that are NON-LIVING, complex molecules — biological agents that infect host cells to aid their reproduction. Too often, we allow human beings to be cast as the infection — a disease that must be contained at all costs. Despite the fact that all humans share 99.9% of our DNA, some are deemed inhuman.

You speak of cleansing as if you had the authority to do so on stolen land. You may fear being replaced, but try fearing eradication. What kind of country feels threatened by those who built its foundation?

Sincerely, Anna Lui

Mouth Tenzin Sivukpa Medium

Midnight Cow

Mackenzie White

Acrylic on Canvas

Sego Lilies

Kendra Larson

verything was moonlight. The silver undersides of sagebrush, dust, the glinting spring filled with salt water, and her skin, wrapped in yellow gingham the color of a harvest moon. Only the white canvas of the wagons, stiffened by the wind off that salt lake, clung to the off-white set into the fabric in Missouri. She was still beautiful, eyes still gleaming over vistas and sunrises, too unlike her name, Graves, though her husband and father still believed it Jay Fosdick. But we didn’t care, hands intertwined over the smooth slopes, separated only twice by scrambling rocks. We found a flat, halfway up the mountain, covered in grass like peach fuzz, sego lilies, and yarrow the only onlookers. We lay there, eyes turned faithfully to the stars, tracing bears and hunters, sisters and crowns. Our fingers ran along the lines of each other’s palms, finding the streams, eddies, deltas she whispered, like reeds on a bluebird day, of flowers, rocks, spiral shells, and aqueducts. I didn’t say anything, just breathed in tune with her heart, her lungs, the words she borrowed from the paper-bound books she never remembered to have rebound. We stayed, breath-

ing in tune, till the last stars faded in the dark grey-blue of dawn. We slowly climbed through the rocks, holding our skirts close in fear of them ripping. We each stole hidden glances at one another, pupils skirting each other’s irises.

I didn’t look at her all day. Instead, I watched my feet, skirts, canvas, or water, watched the iodine swirl in the buckets of water, gold for the morning, clear for the evening, watched the water pour from twisted fabric, hands reddened by lye and the rough metal of the washboard. I didn’t see her climb up on the rocks, lie, arms splayed, in the midday sun, face bronzing as though the light stopped just to trace the curve of her cheekbones, just heard it. Her husband yelled after her, shoulders broad and jaw twitching, his hairline already greying at 23.

“Sarah! God dammit Sarah, where in the Lord’s name did you run off to this time! I can’t find a thing in that goddamn wagon, doggone it… I swear… My lord…”

Jay Fosdick, her husband, yelled, feet stomping around camp for at least ten minutes. Long enough for my brother, Baylis, though he preferred, Lin, to walk over to where I

was doing the washing.

“No wonder that woman won’t look at him: he swears like a poker player down a hundred dollars on his last hand.” Lin perpetually spoke with a glint in his eye and smirk on his lips, both inherited from our father. “Heck, I’m almost blushin’ like a saint and lord knows I ain’t one.”

I gave him a chuckle, and he ran off after he heard Milt calling after him to help feed the oxen. I sat there for some time, hands resting on the edge of the bucket ‘til Hiram came walking up, arms swinging.

“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Hiram’s head blocked out the sun, outlining the harsh set of his jaw.

“Then you’re more possessed than the rest of us.” He went off laughing, and I turned my head away from the sun, catching a glimpse of her dress, skin, billowing hair, and all I thought was thunderclouds.

Thunderclouds stretched across the eastern horizon, waiting just at the edge of the cornfield as though it needed someone to open the gate. The clouds rose like temples to some unnamed power, lightning splitting the sky, turning the pitch-night clouds into bruises, pouring themselves out onto the corn, shoots still small and green in the early summer. The next day Mrs. Reed would come howling down the staircase in the farm house, shake her husband, coffee in hand, and tell her family that she had a dream last night and

knew that the storm was a warning and that the whole family needed to flee west as fast as a suitable wagon for her mother could be made. But standing by the corn, leaning on the rough hewn fence, the clouds were only humbling. She, the first one, worked for a wealthy family in the city and could borrow their smaller wagon to drive out and visit her ailing mother. We would meet at the western gate, the farmhouse far enough away that even young corn hid my skirts and her borrowed wagon. When she came, we would both duck our heads. She would slowly turn the wagon, and the horse would trot as fast as able. We would stop at a small creek, a sign perched on the edge of the bridge once read “Miller’s Creek,” each loop of the letters shot out by farmers’ sons. The sides of the road sloped steeply down into a small flat hidden by verdant trees. We lay beneath elm and oak, birch and poplar, but our favorite were willows. The long branches tilting into the stream turned the world quiet. Alone, the stream our only contender, we let our voices soar with lofty ambitions. She dreamt of going west and losing the world till only the buffalo were left. I dreamt of smaller things, of learning to dance, learning the names of stars, and every flower she smiled at. And so we would go on until the sun glinted off the river and hit our tiring eyes.

“What do you mean you don’t want to go west? The paper said it was a new hope, you know they’re

runnin’ out of land down south sooon enough their won’t be a track of clear land from Georgia to Louisiana!” She nearly shouted as she was quick to anger when it came to the west.

“I heard it was dangerous, Mr. Reed always has stories of people dying in miserable ways on the frontier. The mountains are nearly impassable and once you get over ‘em its desert as far as the eye can see. You’d have to pay me mighty fine to get me to risk it.”

“Aww, come on, Eliza, we could start a farm, grow wheat, corn, peaches, even some dahlias to place in the kitchen window.”

“Please Lily, that’s never gonna work.”

“Ya never know Elli. Ya never know.” Lily’s eyes seemed to darken and her mouth pursed, a single shrill from a bird breaking the willow’s swaying wall.

She snapped back before the sun dipped low enough to pierce our eyelids, catching the glints of gold in her hair. We walked back up the slope, gripping each other’s hands and arms, scrambling through loose dirt. The clouds seemed closer, covering the north half of the valley, thunder rumbling quietly in the clouds. Lily drove me back to the gate as we laughed so hard it nearly confused the horses. She leaned against me when we got to the gate, breath warm on my ear.

“Elli, one day I’m gonna drive right up to that house, sweep you off the porch, and we’ll run west till even

the moon forgets us!” I watched the wagon rock down the road, her hair twisting in the wind. Then, as though it had finally found the right angle for the crowbar, the rain started, angry and violent, washing off any trace of her from my skin.

Lily died on that ride back. A coyote ran onto the road, spooking the horse. The cart wheel was already stuck in the mud, and Lily was looking back over her shoulder and didn’t see the coyote. In their panic, the horses pulled and tipped the cart, throwing Lily to the ground. The wagon fell on her leg just above the knee, trapping Lily beneath the cart. When she was found, her clothes were soaked through, her lips the color of cornflower. The doctor took her back, laid her in a cotton-lined bed, extinguished the lamps, and waited till morning. He found the woman, Lily, still asleep with a black eye and bloodied lip, skin as pale as her namesake.

Everything was shades of white. The storm came sudden and angry, and like a moose with a baby in tow, it trampled every one of us into the dust. I had felt storms before, ones strong enough to pick the roof off of a house like a dandelion and spread its seeds across the fields, but this storm hurt in its own way. The dust, cut with sand and small flecks of hardened salt, sliced against any exposed skin, bringing the children to tears. The best any of us could do was look for the starch white of the

canvas and hope our eyes stayed faithful.

Before we left that morning, Sarah whispered in my ear that once the storm was bad enough to stop the wagons, I should slip into her wagon because the menfolk would be deliberating in the Reed’s grand wagon and we wouldn’t have to worry about them finding us. I smiled and told her I would try, laughing at the confidence in her voice that the wagons would stop, the storm was on the far horizon and thinning, we probably wouldn’t even be caught in it.

The storm seemed to catch up to us, right as we turned around the base of a mountain that the children dubbed Sarsaparilla peak because they had been craving it since Denver. The teamsters wrapped themselves in scarves and put on mittens and glasses to keep the animals going straight. The rest of us hid inside the wagons, and I fought to keep the flaps covering the back closed, catching a fierce gust of wind each time. Even my brother, as sturdy-faced as he was, began to waver with the sound of the sandstorm. Soon, we came to a stop, the teamsters wrapping more scarves around the eyes of the animals as each wagon huddled behind a clump of large boulders. Mr. Reed came up to the wagon and sent me and my brother out into the storm to grab the men from the other wagons and send them to the reeds’.

I poked my head into Sarah’s wagon, yelling at Fosdick to get, I climbed into the wagon. He left, and

we held each other, Sarah flinching at each snap of the canvas. Time seemed to seep away with the sand, leaving our heartbeats adrift. So we waited. Waited for the storm or an arm to push us apart, waited for the oxen to fill with sand, waited for the canvas and wood to buckle and wash us into the desert. Then it rained.

The clouds, shredded open by the sand, poured out a torrent of water, soaking rock, dirt, skin, and petals, leaving the sand sluggish. Everything stopped in an instant. The sun returned with a fury, harsh rays quickly warming the wet canvas. The scent of baked earth and weathered wood lay heavily in the air, sticking to skirts, shirts, skin. The wind was left a soft breath, fluttering the leaves of shrub oak. The whole world was left a wash of yarrow, paintbrush, and sego lilies.

This peice uses the names of members of the Donner-Reed party. The party was a group of settlers traveling from Illinois to Califonia starting in the spring of 1846. The party would eventually become stranded in the Seirra Nevada mountains in Califonia. This story take place in August of 1846, as the party passed by the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The sego lily is that state flower of Utah and found in deserts throughout the intermountain west.

The Wave

Evan Weinstein

Photography

Rafting

Ashlyn Lieberman Oil on Canvas

Rowland Hall

Self Portrait Collage

Ashlyn Lieberman

Mixed Media: Collage, Acrylic Paint and Photograph

Weight of Water

Isabel Himoff

Bea struggled to unbucle the locked seatbelt as water rushed through open windows into the interior of the family car. She had been sleeping until the sharp sound of metal shuddering against concrete had awoken her. Free fall. And the image of the bridge above, pulled back. Now, cold water shocked her body, numbing her fingers as she worked against the buckle. She let out a shrill scream, the sound sucked down into the rising river. She would always remember the looks on her parents’ faces before they were swallowed by the depths of black. She remembered when she scrambled out of the tight strap securing her body. She remembered grabbing her Mama’s hand, too limp compared to the swell of raging water around them. She would never remember which officer pulled her body out the window or how she got to the hospital, only the wet cling of her blue cotton dress. Wet breath cloying against skin, sucking, tightening. Wrapping cold hands around her ribs and squeezing her stomach until she was sick. She was discharged a day later. One day. Twenty-four hours in a lifetime, and one minute is how quickly life can change. Strings snapped. Fabric torn. Lost to wind and current.

Her Nan had told Bea to close her eyes as they passed the site of the crash on the bridge. The older woman hadn’t wanted her granddaughter to see the evidence of it. That was her Nana’s problem. If you didn’t mention it, it would go away. At least, that’s what she said. Bea peeked through her chubby fingers anyway. It was almost indistinguishable, a Jersey barrier warning drivers of the broken wall. Dull concrete. What hurt Bea the most wasn’t the hole but the clear scratches etched into the concrete, like the desperate claw marks of a dog against wood. She could feel those claws against her own heart. Her thoughts felt too deep for an eight-year-old. Warm rivers crept down her cheeks as her Nana looked into the backseat. Reaching a liver-spotted hand towards her granddaughter’s face, she looked pityingly at Bea. The little girl understood the difference between pity and shared grief. She’d never met her grandparents, Bea had never even visited Kingsgrove Manor before. She gazed at the winding private road enclosed by gnarled oak trees. A white picket fence greeted her, along with the brick siding splayed with creeping ivy. It looked bigger, cleaner, maybe more colorful than she thought it to be, how a child

feels when encountering youth. Bea twisted her chubby fingers in the white material of her collared dress. She’d promised her Nana not to get it dirty, but she didn’t want to walk through the daunting front door and instead ran through the fence to the bright woods behind the house. Bushes caught in her brown curls and tugged hair free from the pink ribbon, flitting to the ground like autumn leaves. The contrast between pink silk and dark mud was strikingly beautiful. Pushing soft hair out of her face, she ignored the lingering complaints of her grandparents and crawled through the fresh grasses on her hands and feet. Mud smeared against the sides of her shoes and dipped into the hem of her dress, making it stick to the back of her legs. In green-stained shoes, she reached a clearing of soft clover next to a pond. Breathing hard, she leaned against the trunk of a shady green tree. A tree she would have climbed with her friends once upon a time. She missed playing pretend. She felt older than her eight years could reach, like she’d spent lifetimes propped against this tree listening to stretching boughs and the ripples of the pond. She wasn’t sure she would ever like water again. She felt sick thinking of how dark and deep it could be. Sweet-centered water lilies hugged the edges of the pond. Pink and yellow powdered petals with honeyed stamens. She wondered if they were ever afraid of what lurked beneath them, but that was ridiculous because they were flowers, and everyone knew flowers couldn’t talk. Bea dropped to her knees on the soaken ground, searching through fresh foliage for four-leafed clovers among small

yellow sprouts. She observed the water’s edge and grazed a fingertip across the reflective surface. She admired the courage of sound basking in the unbroken land around her. The reeds sang songs of brushing lips and the water lilies seemed to beat beneath her stare. Like a heartbeat. Or much too fast. A pattern. Footsteps. Bea whipped her head behind her to hear the footsteps stop. A little girl stood in the clearing. She was dressed in a frilled nightgown, ivory color stained and torn at the bottom which led to dirty bare feet. Her light blond locks gave way to alabaster skin which seemed translucent enough to chart the blue veins beneath her skin. Bea took in her visitors’ appearance and stood, fascinated. “Do you live here?” Bea asked. Her companion nodded, icy eyes focused on Bea. “What’s your name?” Bea questioned again. The girl stepped backwards, looking nervously at the ground. She couldn’t have been much younger than Bea, they were both the same height, same round face, big eyes. “Do you speak?” Bea asked. The girl quickly shook her head, turned, and crouched down. Bea watched over the girls’ frill clad shoulder to see her produce a stick to write in the mud. An “E” quickly formed followed by “L”, “E”, “A”, “N”, “O”, and “R”, all written in big defined shaky letters on the ground. “Eleanor.” Bea whispered. The girl nodded and pointed at herself. “You’re Eleanor.” Bea proudly said, “I’m Beatrice, or Bea.” Eleanor smiled, revealing dimples in her pale cheeks. She gestured to the water, to which Bea looked at her confused. Swim? Eleanor wanted her to get into the water. Bea shook her head quickly, “I don’t want to. I’m scared.” Bea

thought her new friend would understand and quickly move on like her old schoolmates, but the girl reached out a hand. Eleanor was comforting her, Bea thought. Hand outstretched, upwards facing towards cotton clouds, reaching for her. Bea giggled, grabbing her friend’s hand, finding it shockingly cold for a hot summer day. It felt like relief against her sweaty palm. She grinned at Eleanor, who smiled back, tugging her towards the pond. Bea stood confused as the girl pulled her. “No, I don’t want to get in. I don’t want to!” She struggled against the tight grip of Eleanor’s cold hand, scratching the skin and leaving small crescent moons in the pale flesh. Eleanor looked back at her before they entered the water. Keeping a firm grip on Bea’s hand, she gestured to close her eyes and breathe deeply. Bea stood frozen in fear, but watching her friend relax at the edge of the water made her calm down. It felt good to observe the world around them. To smell the heat of sweet scented grasses, taste summer breeze, and listen to the hum of crickets and singing birds around her. She found herself closing her eyes and breathing in deeply. Shoulders rise, Chest expands. Shoulders fall, breath let loose. Eleanor’s grip on her hand suddenly disappeared and she felt cold hands take hold of her upper arms as her eyes flew open. She turned to look back when hot breath against her ear halted her movement. Eleanor’s raspy voice scratched against her ears as a chilling rhyme ensued.

“One little girl went out to play, By the pond at end of day… She slipped and fell with no one there, Let’s see how long your breath will fare.” Eleanor’s grip surged forward and was gone just as quickly. Free fall. Bea watched the dark surface of the pond get closer and closer until the water met her eyes and uncomfortable itching pain poured beneath her eyelids. Dark. Cold. Deep. Bea opened her eyes to blurred water around her, covering her scalp and all her body as she submerged. She broke free of her shock to choke on stale air, and in her rush to the surface, failed to feel the icy fingers wrapped around her ankle. Bea looked below her, watching a pale hand give way to the drowned corpse of Eleanor’s body dragging her down. The halo of white hair around the corpse’s head illuminated pale, unseeing eyes watching her. Drowning her. The weight of water. Pressed against her teeth, tongue, and throat. Angry tears in her eyes dispersed into the cold water, like a sound in the wind. Gone. She kicked. And Kicked. And when her eyes began to grow heavy and a blanket of blackness crept into her vision and soothed the heat in her lungs, she bent towards Eleanor’s head and pulled tendrils of white hair with all her strength, aimed for the face, and fought. For life. Her life. Second chance. Strong fingers released her ankles and with a scream ringing through the darkness of the water, and Eleanor was gone. Bea’s grandmother had chastised her for getting the white dress wet and ruined. Chastised her for her rampant

imagination. She didn’t believe. Why would she? But when Bea returned to her room for bed and turned off the light, she crept to the window, awaiting a view of smooth, undisturbed water. And in the

light of the stars and moon, Bea found that it was disturbed. By a head of white hair and pale eyes. On her.

Moss Waterfall

Evan Weinstein

Photograph

Leap

Ruby McMaster Oil

Crab

Mackenzie White

Acrylic on Canvas

Waterfalls Make for Bad Swimming Pools

Milo van Isplen

Sinners go to Hell. Nobody wants to go to Hell.

The crumbling pavement was rough under my shoes, giving away underneath me as I hurried to his house. He’d called me a few minutes ago.

“I think the skies are blue today,” he’d said. It meant something bad was up. It was a code he’d insisted we create after an incident with his father a few nights ago, the one Elias wouldn’t tell me about. All I knew was that his father would be angry and do something to Elias again if he overheard us speaking about anything suspicious.

I clumsily scaled the sharp, wired fence that stood around his house, my leg painfully brushing against it. I knew his father was home, so I crept behind the house to knock on Elias’ bedroom window rather than the front door. I found it already blown open, so I ducked inside.

Inside, Elias was asleep, his arms stretched directly outwards, almost as if imitating the crucified Jesus statue that sat on his desk in the corner. I never understood why he kept the gruesome statue; we’d found it lying in the gutter one day with the paint nearly entirely stripped away. He’d insisted on bringing it home and spent hours

repainting even the tiniest wrinkles on Jesus’ little wooden face while I sat behind him watching. His scarred, calloused hands intrigued me, the tiny bones and tendons articulating as expertly as a puppetmaster’s strings.

“Elias, wake up,” I nudged him hard with my shoe.

“Why the hell did you call me?” He didn’t respond, his dark eyelids still as a sculptor’s hand. A faint bruise lingered over his left cheek his father’s doing. I grabbed his wrist to make sure his heart was still beating. His arm jerked from my grip as his stiff legs scrambled away from me in a frenzy. It’s me, I assured him. I met his eyes as his muscles released the sudden tension. The familiar crinkles in his cheeks rippled as he smiled then flattened again as his expression grew dark. Elias lifted himself off the mattress and half-stumbled, half-walked to the windowsill where I had leaped from moments before.

Come on, we need to go fly kites. Now, he muttered sternly, now swiftly strutting through his room, grabbing his backpack, already packed with essentials. It was code for our emergency protocol

we had to leave. I followed him, finding my own emergency bag. We silently left his house, carefulness exceeding urgency as we knew what his father would do if he discovered us. Elias wore only the flimsy shoes he refused to throw away, but he paid it no mind as he nimbly hopped over the fence as easily as one might step over a curb. My cheeks burned as I struggled to imitate him. He stood on the asphalt as I nearly broke my neck on the way down from my jump. Had this been a usual day, Elias would have lent me a chuckle at my unceremonious performance. Today, however, his mind was elsewhere, his face lifeless, his feet nervously tapping against the ground. I nearly asked him what happened, but I knew it’d be fruitless.

I shook his shoulder.

“C’mon, we need to get out of here before he realizes something.” Elias nodded absently, his eyes trained on the horizon. The sun was setting. Elias began to run, his backpack bouncing against his back. I followed him, knowing if I turned back I’d never find my own way out of this town.

We passed the old ranches Elias and I would hide in, near the tiny ski lounge where we’d play Pac-Man. Elias somehow always beat me at the game, elusively escaping the tiny colorful ghosts. I had never left Jackson Hole before, born and raised under the elk-antlered archways and tiny hole-in-the-wall shops. My mother and I used to frequent the lush elk refuge just out of town each winter until she got sick, her illness trapping her indoors, the place I hated. My uncle would take care of her with

me gone. The wind whipped my curls against my face as I ran away from what I knew.

Elias silently whispered prayers as he ran. A few months ago, I mustered up the courage to ask him why he prayed. Elias told me his father used to bring home women. They’d wear nothing but white silk robes and lie lazily on Elias’ favorite couch, yelling crude, sinful remarks at eight-year-old Elias. He told me the only way he could fend off their sins was to pray. It stuck with him. “Those women were sinners,” he said to me the night we’d climbed the giant twisting oak. “When they die, they’ll go to Hell.”

I think he told me these things to make himself feel better. When I told him I didn’t believe hell was real, he just shook his head, looking to the wispy clouds above and said, “Neither do they.”

Above us, sleek, black starlings darted through the thick cerulean sky. The sun was almost finished ducking below the mountain-peaked horizon. Elias took a left turn at a fork in a dirt road I didn’t recognize. The path eventually thinned and grew overgrown with sweeping tree branches that brushed through our sweat-slicked hair. Elias’ pace quickened as he took so many left and right turns that I lost track. His shoulders began to slump, his facade breaking. The straps of my backpack dug tightly into my shoulders. I could feel the burning abrasions on the skin under my t-shirt. Doubt and regret burned in my throat, but I knew I could never grant words to those feelings. I did this for Elias, and questioning him would

only make it harder for both of us.

“Elias, where are we going?” I asked him, desperately trying to catch my stubborn escaping breaths.

“You’ll see,” was his only response. His face remained poised forward, but a faint grin danced on his lips. It wasn’t necessarily a happy grin, but the one he used when he knew something I didn’t, which was often.

Hours later, the dense foliage enveloped the darkened sky, blocking out the little light we’d been led by. The light beaming from the rising moon peeked through the leaves towering above, showering us in piercing fluorescence. It could barely be considered “light,” only allowing my eyes a meter of space in front of me, meticulously hiding sharp rocks and shrubbery in looming shadows. My legs grew weary, then numb, then nearly collapsed. For some reason, my tired eyes refused to refocus in the darkness, and then my only proof of Elias’ existence was the gentle rustling of leaves a few steps in front of me. Then, silence. At first, I thought my ears had failed me after so much time and I wondered how much time had actually passed.

“Elias?” I whispered, images of what might have happened to him invading my thoughts. The only response was my labored breaths, guzzling air like a drunkard. Panic simmered in my chest.

“Elias, where the hell did you go?” A killdeer’s shrill call cut the thick silence. I began to run, my body forgetting its heaviness as I scram-

bled for any proof of where he’d gone. The loud crunching of leaves beneath me was drowned out by a pounding in my head, each thump pumping blood in my heart fast, too quickly for my brain to process.

“ELIAS?” I screamed, my voice cracking from lack of use. Suddenly, a pair of sturdy hands firmly gripped my shivering shoulders. A raw, guttural sound escaped my throat as I flinched away from the touch.

“Relax, it’s me,” the person carefully spoke. I spun around to be met with Elias’ bursting laughter, a sound I’d feared I’d forget. I reeled on him, the brief moment of disbelief dwindling.

“What the actual hell are you doing?”

“Follow me I found something cool,” he replied, a rare, mischievous tone brushing over his words.

“Is that why we’re here? ‘Cause you found something cool?” I pressed, my exhaustion channeling into annoyance. You made me follow you into the middle of nowhere ‘cause you found something cool? Sarcasm dripped from my voice.

“Do you even understand what this means for me?” Elias ignored my outburst, and instead flashed a grin–the special kind where you could see his dimples playfully jumping towards his eyes– and ducked under a painfully thorned bush. Every atom of my body wanted me to turn back, leave him in this terrifying forest and go home. I didn’t.

After so much walking, the muscles in my legs strained at the

newfound movement of crouching below the thorns. By the time I’d escaped its scraggly clutches, the skin on my legs and arms was peppered with thin, white scratches. The pain was cut short as I looked up from my limbs to find Elias.

He stood proudly, his arms stretched wide. Behind him, a sheer cliff stood with a glittering waterfall slipping down slimy, slick rocks. The sleek water reflected the silver light from the moon. Thick, braided trunks of aged trees framed the fall on both sides, thriving in the misty spray of liquid moon splashing from the rocks. At the bottom of the waterfall, where Elias and I stood, lay a rippling pond, speckled with the stalky stems of cattails and smooth, water-weathered stones. It seemed to be straight out of the books Elias read to me the ones he hid behind his bookcase that told of underwater cities and mystical creatures. I wondered how I hadn’t heard the thundering sound of water crashing into water from the trail, but my speculations were quickly forgotten as Elias spoke.

“Pretty cool, right?” Elias grinned. I’d forgotten how long it had been since I’d seen his eyes light up like that. In the moonlight, his normally evergreen eyes took on a turquoise hue, framed by the star-ridden sky.

“Yeah.”

Elias sprinted in the direction of the pond, quickly peeling off his sweatsoaked shirt and kicking his shoes off with a flick, all without slowing down. His backpack already lay discarded in the grass.

Before I could react tell him the water wasn’t nearly deep enough for

diving– he jumped, screaming, “Jesus, take the wheel!”

The tendons and muscles in his legs bent and released like a broken rubber band, sending him flying towards the horrifyingly shallow waters. The impact of his flailing limbs sent shockwaves through the shimmering water, the faint reflections of stars in the water scattering like dust particles in the air. Quickly, I stripped off my shirt and shoes and recklessly stepped in after him. The freezing water sent shivers up my spine, gooseflesh erupting on my arms and bare back. I frantically moved my arms through the water, praying I’d find him somehow. The water resisted my movement.

“Elias, this isn’t funny. What if you f****** drown?” I yelled. A splash came from behind me and two bony arms grabbed me, pulling me below the surface before I could catch a breath. I twisted and pulled, but I couldn’t release the painfully tight grip on my chest. Fingernails dug into my skin, and I yelled into the water, accidentally inhaling the liquid. I quickly became aware that I couldn’t breathe, and in doing so made me try to breathe in more. Water filled my lungs like black sludge as I panicked, suffocating. A force began to push me to the surface. For a moment, I thought Elias had been right, and God was real, come to save me from these watery clutches. Then I broke the surface of the water, and the cold air enveloped me in a stabbing embrace. I still couldn’t breathe, and the pressure on my chest was too much to bear. A rough grip on my chest pressed down, up, down, up, nearly breaking my ribs. I

screamed, but it came out as more of a garble as water spewed from my mouth. I could breathe. Gasping, I slowly sat, propping myself up with my sore arm.

“Are you okay?” A voice said. Elias looked at me with a terrified expression. I’d never seen him like this before, and it scared me. I nodded, still not sure if my voice would work. Elias had been the one to pull me down- probably in a joking manner– but he’d also been the one to rescue me. I nodded again to make sure he saw.

“I guess waterfalls make for bad swimming pools, huh?” I tested my voice, coughing. Elias punched my arm. I laughed,

“Violence is a sin, you’re going to hell for that.”

Elias didn’t respond, his eyes now trained on the faint trails of clouds visible in the rising moonlight. He drifted off like this often. I wondered what he thought about, what made the crinkles in his cheeks curl the way that they did, why sometimes he’d close his eyes and mutter things he thought I couldn’t hear. I didn’t ask him why. He wouldn’t tell me anyways.

I walked over to where our soiled clothes and bags lay, leaving Elias sitting in the grass. I cringed as I pulled my shirt back on, the sweat and grime making it stick uncomfortably to my scratched, wet skin. When I looked back at Elias, he was knelt to the ground with his hands clasped together, whispering an unheard prayer. His eyes were closed, sopping wet hair dripping down his cheeks in shiny globs. I sighed.

An hour or so later, Elias stood up and walked over to me, his hair and

chest now relatively dry. His knees were covered in mud from kneeling. I sat on a rock a safe distance away from the water, throwing stones at the pond in feeble attempts to make them bounce across. Elias crouched behind me. He rustled through the smooth stones of the pond’s shore, and eventually found one that suited him. His steady hands were covered in little coarse scars, proof of a life lived vicariously. Elias focused intently on the pond, the surface eerily calm despite the crashing waterfall nearby. His eyebrows narrowed as he expertly threw the stone. It skipped across the water as Elias counted its jumps.

“One… two… three… four… five,” he whispered under his breath. “Six!”

The stone disappeared with a plop under the surface. The ripples echoed through the water, each ring moving slower and slower. He looked at me expectantly. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a reaction. We sat in silence.

“Why’d you activate the emergency protocol?” I asked, watching the spitting waterfall collide with the jutting rocks. His expression dimmed as I glanced in his direction.

“What happened?” I pushed, “Something with your dad?” Even after all the late-night conversations, the whispered moments, we’d never truly spoken about Elias’ father before. He refused to tell me. Somehow, he always told me so much and so little all at once. It was as if he knew exactly what I wanted to hear and told me something entirely different, telling me it was what I needed. I always believed him and I never cared he had things to say and I was curious just curious enough to want to

listen, but not for anything more. This time, however, was different. I wanted him to tell me why. Why had I followed him through an endless path, walked away from everything I knew, just because he told me to? Why did we have to use coded messages, and why did it feel as if every time Elias spoke, he used a code for which I didn’t have a translation? Elias remained silently still, eyes trained on the spot where his pebble had vanished. The pond was now still, the ripples caused by the stone now a memory only shared between us. I stood up from the rock. Every muscle on my body ached, even ones I didn’t know I had reminders of the helpless trek I’d just done. I’d followed Elias down this harrowing path in vain hopes he might finally tell me why he needed to run away, not to let him deny me anytime I tried to help. I stiffly walked to my bag, hooking it on my shoulders. It rubbed uncomfortably against my abraded skin. I glanced at Elias. He sat on the rock, elbows propped on his knees as his eyes trailed down the gliding waterfall, watching the spray of water torpedo through the air and onto the rocks and grass. I turned my head and ran back into the thorny forest.

Wavy Kendall Kanarowski Acrylic on Paper

Interviews

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Interiew with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

All poems must talk about what it means to be alive.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer visited Rowland Hall’s creative writing class in January on Zoom, reading from her most recent books All the Honey and The Unfolding. She has 13 collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in O Magazine, A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, American Life in Poetry, on fences, in back alleys, on Carnegie Hall Stage and on hundreds of river rocks she leaves around town. Her poems have been used for choral works by composers Paul Fowler and Jeffrey Nytch and performed around America. Her collection, Hush, won the Halcyon prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Other books include Even Now , The Less I Hold and If You Listen , a finalist for the Colorado

Book Award. In 2023 she released All the Honey ; Beneath All Appearances an Unwavering Peace (a book for grieving parents with artist Rashani Réa); a book of writing prompts, Exploring Poetry of Presence II ; and Dark Praise , a spoken word album with Steve Law. She lives with her husband and daughter in Placerville, Colorado, on the banks of the wild and undammed San Miguel River.

What was the process of writing your poem “For the Living”?

My son Finn chose to take his life in August of 2021. That night, the first night that he died, we were in Georgia at the time, helping my parents move into their new home. When he died that night, I went out walking in the dark up and down the street. My friend, Wendy called and said to me, “He has given you his love light to carry. The moment she said those words to me, a firefly lit up right in front of my face like this. I was astonished. I was like this little light. Right when she said it, I said, oh my God, I’ll never forget. These words were so helpful for me. In fact, I wish I could give them to anyone who’s grieving because it was so helpful to think of that love coming through me and bringing his love through the world as a way to meet his loss.

I feel like “For the Living” is a little bit different for me because I feel like it’s giving advice or just telling us what to do. And I tend to not like that style of poem. But that’s how it came out. So I obeyed the emerging form. I ended up going with what was showing up. But the sentence—“it is our work to weep and it is our work to be healed”—I just don’t know if I believe in being healed anymore. I wonder about what that would even look like to be healed? Would that mean that I wouldn’t miss the person who was gone? Would it mean that I wouldn’t still love them or wish they were or maybe not wish they were here, but to still love them, to still miss them, to

still feel the ache of the loss? I don’t know that I really believe that goes away, and I don’t think it’s something I even want. So I’m not so sure I believe it’s our work to be healed, but I do think it is our work to continue to show up and be loving.

Where did the idea of healing come from, and how has your thinking about it progressed?

My own understanding of grief just continues to change. I didn’t know how much it changed. I didn’t know how much it would change me. I didn’t know how it became a part of who we are, and that’s not a problem. I don’t know if it’s uniquely American or just a modern story that we’re supposed to be fine, that everything’s supposed to be good, that it’s all supposed to be better than good. It’s supposed to be great or perfect. Who told that story? Why did we start believing it? This seems ridiculous. Of course, things are difficult. Of course, there’s absolute beauty and absolute terror. There’s wonder, and there’s fear. There’s sorrow, and there’s hope. It’s all of it all at once. And I think trying to pretend that it’s only supposed to be this “I’m doing great” world and that we’re always trying to get to that world will make us miserable. And I feel like the poems in this book and in my next book, The Unfolding, the energetic thrust of them both is this idea that we are here in a world that has both of these experiences. What we’re here to do is to feel all of it. Of course, maybe we prefer to feel great, but the truth is that we’re also going to feel awful. And how do we meet those moments? How do we turn toward those moments when

it feels difficult to be alive? How do we turn to those moments? How do I turn toward this and be wholehearted at the same time? That’s the real invitation to bring our whole self to find love in every moment, not just the moments that are great. Because how often is it like that? So, how do we find love? How do we find connection? How do we find creativity and curiosity in the moments that are difficult for us? How do you take these very common images and add those theoretical concepts?

I would just wonder, what does this thing have to teach me with this trust that I have that absolutely everything in the world has something to teach us. So today, grief is an earthworm. Then I make a list of the properties of that thing. It has a two-part rhythm to it. It’s grit. It is underground. It moves slowly. I make a list of all the things about that thing. Then I make a list of what does it do or what is its purpose. So the earthworm moves slowly, and it changes the soil. It creates porosity. It’s simple. It just expands, contracts, expands, contracts. And then I ask it, what do you have to teach me? So that’s like a little three-part formula, but we could say maybe there’s a fourth part, which is if I name what the metaphor is, grief and earthworm. So I have these two things, an abstract and a concrete. And then I let, whatever comes up for me, when I’m doing that little pre-work. I create the poem out of that. And what’s wonderful about

this whole process, too, is that there’s always a surprise in it for me. I don’t know where the poem’s going, which is one of my little rules for myself: I can’t know where the poem is going. If you already know where it’s going, you will be forever bored. But if you don’t know where the poem is going, you will be forever surprised. And this is why I can still write a poem every day, because every day there’s a surprise. The worst advice I think I’ve ever heard for writing is write what you know. That is so boring. If I wrote what I knew, I would have run out of things to write about long ago. But to continually write past what we know into what we don’t know, that’s to invite curiosity into every time we meet the page. And now there’s this chance for epiphany. There’s this chance for wonder. This is a paradox, and poems love paradox because life is full of paradox. Every time I think I can write something true in a poem, I invite myself to write the opposite thing and see if it’s equally true. It almost always is.

Poems love paradox because life is full of paradox.

The question that I ask anything is, what do you have to teach me? And I feel like that’s also when we’re writing poems about memories. There’s the part where we just record the memory of it, right?

This is what happened. It’s not very exciting what happened. In the memory for the poem “Anti-Limit,” the record player broke. So then there’s the chance in the poem to wonder, why does this matter? So what? And so when writing about a memory, there’s one or two ways we can maybe look at it. One is to wonder, what did I know in that moment? What does that moment have to teach me now? Or the other one would be, what do I know now that I didn’t know then? And I feel like both of them make the poem more interesting because, again, both of them take us into the place of what we don’t know. If we’re writing about a memory, we already know what happened. So, how do we find something new in it? In this case, it’s the past reaching forward to tell me something now, right? Something broken can be beautiful. Sometimes breaking brings a gift we didn’t know we needed. And in this case, the music itself is not happy, joyful music: it’s really this kind of haunting, soulful music. That’s what grief is, right? It’s being haunted. It’s feeling like you’re being scraped. And it’s beautiful. So again, there’s the paradox. It’s both painful and beautiful at the same time. And so that memory of the broken record player, this painful and beautiful music, kind of teaching me something about what it is to be alive? All poems must talk about what it means to be alive. They must wrestle with it, not to answer the question, but to just again and again and again be brought into the wonder of what does it mean to be alive? Because if a poem doesn’t do that, it will be positively boring, and it

will not matter.

It’s clear that you have this connection with the natural world. And I’m wondering how that connection and comfort was affected by this tremendous grief that you’re going through?

Definitely the connection with the natural world has been a big part of my writing for decades. I have to say that after Finn died, one of the things I would do is just go outside and walk and be in the trees and be with the birds and be in the garden, lie down in the grass, and sit by the river. And to feel held by the world was so important to me. In fact, I remember how I had a practice of it. It was fall. And I started taking photographs of beautiful dead things, leaves and sticks and carcasses, and skeletons. There’s the paradox, right? It’s beautiful, and it’s dead. And to continually find that outside of me helped to touch what was happening inside of me. The poem itself is built out of two things: what’s happening inside, and what’s happening outside. And then the poem becomes a bridge between these two worlds. And the more that I could pay attention to what was happening in the outside world and how the natural world meets death, the more it helped me inside know how to meet death. Not that there is one right way. There’s not one right way. When I say how to meet death, it’s not like I’m looking for the answer. It’s just how I meet it this minute, from minute to minute to minute.

With your daily writing, how did you determine that poems are what you wanted to write?

I’ve always loved poems, and that started when I was young. I’ve always loved poetry, the play of poetry. There’s joy in poems, just rhythm and rhyme. As you’ve seen, most of the poems in my book are free verse, but there’s lots of rhyme and meter that’s hidden, that’s kind of woven in. It’s not the predictable end rhymes. It’s not the kind of predictable four-beat lines of American pop, nor are most of them fivebeat iambic pentameter. I am a very orally-driven writer. So I’m always hearing the music of the poems as I’m writing. Music is what draws me to poetry more than anything, just the play that’s available, and also, let’s be honest, the efficiency. I just love that with poems; you can sit down and write a poem in ten minutes. I finished writing three novels. It took seven years. I really love that poems say so much in just a small, small space. And they play; they’re musical.

How do you decide on the structures of your poems?

I had a friend named Jack Mueller, who was a fabulous, genius, terrifying man, and almost always drunk. He used to growl this: “Obey the poems’ emerging form!” That wisdom is so spot on. Instead of sitting down and thinking, okay, I’m going to write 14 lines of iambic pentameter, I start to write, and then I think, “What if I repeat that line?” Oh, what if, as you’re writing, the form

starts to show up, and then when it’s done, I’ll kind of go back and revise it and think, “what if I pull this image through now?” So, to me, the whole thing is a kind of big game of “what if?” That’s how I think about revision. The form just continually suggests itself as you go. There’s nothing to start, and the moment you begin writing, it starts to open up. You mentioned that you have a daily writing practice. How do you find images for everyday? Are there specific ways that you find and choose images? When I first started writing a poem a day, I didn’t think it was possible. I was nervous, back then, about showing up to a blank page. That seemed scary because what if I show up to a blank page and nothing happens? I’d be looking for the poem all day long, like “where’s the poem? Is it about that car? Is it about that sidewalk? Is it about that leaf?” Because I didn’t want to come to the blank page empty. I was afraid of it. The great thing about that is that it changes the way we pay attention to the world. It kind of opens up our attention. We start paying attention better. There was also kind of a frenetic quality though. Eventually I began to trust that I could sit down with nothing and wait for something. And I actually love a blank page now. If nothing shows up, no images come, I’ll do one of three things. I’ll just look around me. Okay, window. Maybe I’ll do that little exercise that I told you about, we did grief and the worm. So maybe it’s window, and I could choose any other abstract. Window and

innocence or door and justice or chair and heat. You can take any abstract and any concrete and put them together and then wonder what they have to say to each other, and you’ll always find something. But if you don’t find something, that’s interesting too. All we have to do is write the truth. If you just write the truth, people will always be interested because the truth is forever interesting. We only get into trouble when we try to write something smart or when we try to write something good. That’s the fastest way to write something really irrelevant. I can either sit there until something comes or I read someone else’s poem. And I just read a lot of poems until I find something that hits me. And then I get very curious about why it hit me and what they did. One of the things that I do is argue with the poet. They have a take on an idea, and then you write a poem in response.

In thinking about your poem “And Mean it, Too,” do you have any tips for how to integrate science and physics into a poem without interrupting the flow?

How do we apply this little piece of knowledge to what it means to be alive? And this is always the question: what does it mean to be alive? One of the poems toward the beginning of the book is about the neutron star and grief. We’re looking at the way that things pass through us, literally. Is it possible that I could let thoughts pass through me also? What if we let the thoughts pass through just like, at any given moment, these trillions of neutrinos are passing through. The key is that you don’t need to know it when

you start. I had no idea where the poem was going when I began, but I was just fascinated with this idea of trillions of neutrinos passing through us. If I let myself write enough about the science fact, it sparks curiosity. Again, I ask it, “what do you have to teach me?” That opens up that curiosity, opens up that wonder, opens up that connection to create the metaphor. In this way, you can ground it in human experience.

How do you approach the music in poetry?

There are a few main ways that we can do that. One, of course, is with rhythm. Rhyme could be just vowel sounds. The other kind of factor in the music is just repetition of a word or a phrase, or even a syntactic structure. How you pull through repetition is what makes the music. Are you going to make it with a rhyme? Are you going to make it with a beat? Are you going to make it with a repeated structure?

Interiew with Percival Everett

Whereas I knew the world, I didn’t remember any of the language.

Percival Everett won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his most recent novel, James, a contemporary retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Students from Rowland Hall’s AP Language classes visited with Everett at the University of Utah November 6th to talk about the novel and his writing life. His other notable literary works include Erasure (2001), I am not Sidney Politier (2009), The Trees (2021) and James (2024). Everett was granted the Windham-Campell Prize in 2023 for fiction, the National Book Award For Fiction in 2024. His often satire-filled books reflect the experience of being a person of color in America through an ironic lens. James is told from the point of view of Jim, an enslaved black man, as he escapes his enslaver, Miss. Watson. Jim meets Huck, a white boy who faked his

death in order to escape his abusive, alcoholic father. Together they embark on a harrowing journey by raft down the Mississippi River in search of the elusive Free States. Everett’s satirical, critical humor and storytelling bring new light onto the classic tale of Huck Finn.

One of the central aims of your book seems to be to provide James a sense of autonomy, to give him respect and agency. And one way you do that is with the separate internal voice of your monologue. What concerns me is that it sets up the argument that there is something inherently inferior in speaking like a slave or talking black, that James has to speak like the Western canon or like a white person to be worthy of that respect. Why did you provide James with a separate internal dialogue using language he wouldn’t necessarily use? Is it the language that you grew up hearing?

I grew up where the Civil War started: South Carolina. I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s. That language is a myth. I use standard English for the enslaved people to communicate because it works for the novel. The one thing I know is that they would have had a way to communicate with each other that would not allow their oppressors entry. It could have sounded any number of ways, but what would have been true is that they would have been able to communicate with the complexity of anyone else talking. The depiction of enslaved people, invariably—in our culture, and in film and in literature—has been superstitious, simple minded, uneducated people. And that’s not true. There was a recording made by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) in the 1930’s where they interviewed people who had, for parts of their lives, been enslaved. The recordings are great because they sound like

you, and they sound like me, but when they were transcribed, they sounded like the “slave talk” that I put in this novel. That was not written down by people who talk like this; that was a performance—just as his performance here—but it was a performance then by white people transcribing black people. The racism of that is fantastic. The people would say, “I,” but the transcript would say “I s’n.” You have to remember that from the way that we have received depictions of enslaved people.

I did not want to owe any loyalty to [Mark Twain’s] text.

You read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn fifteen times. At which point did you decide to write your novel James ? And did you go back and read Twain as you were writing?

I had read it many years ago. I never had this idea. When I decided to do it, I wanted to inhabit the world that Mark Twain was writing about, but I did not want to owe any loyalty to his text. Since I’m an admirer of Twain, it would be very likely that I would try to write like him. And so what reading it so many times did for me is I got sick of it. It became a blur. And whereas I knew the world, I didn’t remember any of the language. In fact, the world became such a blur that I also didn’t remember what I would be retelling, and when I closed the book the last time, I’ve never looked at Huck Finn again since. After

reading it that many times, I can tell you fairly honestly that I’m never going to read it again. I hate that novel now, but it allowed me a certain kind of freedom.

There’s a pretense of sensitivity that we can exercise in this culture without really being sensitive

With different current events and recent news, such as book bans and other things, was there anything in particular that prompted you to write James?

It was more a combination of things. I was surprised that no one had thought to do this before. But then I realized, I hadn’t thought of it either. I know the character Jim had been used in short stories, but almost as far as I can see, it was always after the story of Huck Finn, Jim as an older man or something like that. One of the things I wanted to address was: what’s the depiction of enslaved people? There’s a film called 12 Years a Slave (2013). It’s about a black man. This was not uncommon, where a black person would be abducted from a northern Free State and carried and transported to the south and sold into slavery. That was this man’s story. But there was something in the film that really bothered me about language, and that’s when this black man who was free in the North is taken to Louisiana and sold into slavery, he’s thrown in with other black people—enslaved people. And he understands what they’re saying to each

other, and that’s wrong. He has not been inculturated with them. He has not lived with these people who have developed a society of their own that has created walls that keep them safe. Again who knows how they would actually sound, but it’s cheating the enslaved people out of their humanity if this character, just by virtue of his skin color, can understand the sophisticated system of communication that they have developed Well, a couple of years ago, right when I was starting this novel, there was a film on with Abbott and Costello, these white guys who made movies in the 40s. This movie was called Screams From Africa (1949). Keep in mind this is 2021, and here’s this movie. The depiction of black people in Africa are stereotypic images of dumb people just carrying stuff away. Well, I know movies like that exist. That’s the culture that those products came out of. Fine– it’s offensive. What makes it more offensive was that some producer in 2021 thought it was okay to just air that, out of context, as if this is normal. That’s not the only instance of that on television. It’s constant. I’m convinced that the producer who did this would make an effort to say “N word” every time instead of saying the word “n*****” in conversation. There’s a pretense of sensitivity that we can exercise in this culture without really being sensitive and just doing performative things, which doesn’t make us more attentive or plugged into

Do you think that that type of performative act or speech of the enslaved characters is a myth? I’m reading the novel in that sense, that their speech action is just all sort of a façade. making an affair.

Again, I wouldn’t know what that speech would be. But, let’s suggest the idea of the African American experience. Well, that doesn’t exist. To reduce it to one experience is to diminish an entire people. Black Americans are different from region to region, from socioeconomic class to socioeconomic class, from religion to religion, just as different as white people because that’s what it is to be human. All of these things inform who you are. So when we speak about an African American experience, we’ve fallen into a trap of singularity that does not exist, and then, especially if you happen to be a person of color, you start looking for that. I’ll tell you something that’s a little bit scary, but it’s worth knowing. The only thing that Black Americans share from region to region, religion to religion, economic group to economic group, is one thing, and that is the American experience with authority. When a person of color, whether native or African American, if you are in any way brown, when you see the blue lights in your rear view mirror, it’s a different thing from when white people see it. It doesn’t matter where you live. White people think I might get a ticket; I think I might get shot. That’s the one thing we share everywhere. Everything else is just as dependent on those other factors as it is for anyone else.

In the novel, you privilege writing and reading as forms of ultimate freedom for James. Why did you do this?

I’ve been writing for 40 years. I have no power, but reading is the place where James finds freedom. It’s the freedom of thought, and that’s where all freedom begins, to be able to think clearly and then to communicate freely with the people you care about.

I grew up with jazz and classical music. I loved jazz, and then as an adult, I heard the beginnings of rap. It wasn’t something I responded to, but what I loved was the fact that people were expressing themselves in a different way. I remember one of the first things I heard that moved me in that form of music was the refrain, “don’t push me, because I’m close to the edge.” I thought that’s a great poem. It wasn’t new in the world of music because in the 60s, there were Chicago groups and lots of poets doing that kind of rap. We don’t think of it as important, but the scratching on the records is a fantastic statement. The notion of it comes right out of jazz; it’s doing violence to the system. Here’s this thing, the record—what does it symbolize? It’s the production of the music. To scratch at it and to use it in a different way is the same thing jazz musicians are doing when they improvise within a melody and push it toward the boundaries of recognition. People are always making new art and finding new languages to reflect what they’re thinking and what they need.

Do you believe stereotypes such as black cats being seen as ‘bad luck’ are based off of slavery and racism in the past, and how does this correlate to your novel?

There is colorism within our culture.

Some of it is just in language, but a lot of those things do persist. There was a study done with children in the 60’s where they presented dolls to young Black kids. They said, “Which one is you?” The dolls were identical, but one was Black. And the kids, for the most part, identified the white doll as them. They live in this culture, and they’re acculturating this way. The real sadness is that 20 years later, they repeated the test, and the same thing happened. That’s disturbing. There is colorism within our culture, and we would be naive to deny that. Those ideas and prejudices have certainly diminished, but they persist. We have to understand that certainly the stuff that Jim is being subjected to is full of that kind of reading. There are things that have nothing to do with race like “black skies,” meaning something bad is going to happen. I don’t think that has anything to do with race. But if you put in the mouth of a racist, then it might. Context means everything. When something happens, who says it, why they say it, and how it‘s received has much to do with whether these things will be examples of some kind of racism.

What was the inspiration for the scene in the novel in which the man touches James’ hair? How does that reflect on the issues of race?

There’s always this weird fetishizing of Black people in America. And one of them is touching someone’s hair. Again, I’ll bring up South Carolina. The one drop rule is, if you have one drop of Black blood, then you are legally Black. So if your mother is white, and your father is Black, you’re Black. Why? Because there is an advantage to one over the other. There is a discriminatory history of one as opposed to the other.

In South Carolina, in the 19th century, there was a racist governor, Ben Tillman, whose nickname was “pitchfork Ben Tillman.” In a room in the McKissick Library at the University of South Carolina, to other like-minded, white, racist men,

Tillman said, “We cannot adopt this rule because if we do, not one of us in here can own land.” There was a recognition that all of them were already mixed. Some of them had the luxury of it being a secret. In America, even if we’re not by blood mixed—by experience, we are—we live together. And that’s a remarkable thing. It’s been the most defining factor in this American experience of race, which is why Huckleberry Finn is important because we’re always trying to navigate and understand—even now with this upcoming election—that there’s division being courted by trying to exploit our differences, and that’s a frightening thing.

Do you think that writing is sort of a natural evolution? Can reading alone be enough without writing?

The other day someone said, “Are you a writer?” And I say, “No, I’m a reader.” What’s interesting about being a reader is you participate as much in the making of the book as the writer. It doesn’t exist without the reader. That’s one of the things that’s kind of sad about the global just art in general is, and I don’t like any talk about awards and prizes for arts enthusiasts, comparisons. There’s no place where they exist under a bed someplace. There’s a great book that someone has not published, maybe better than anything I’ve ever read and I just wish that someone would find it and publish it. People are going to make

their art, and that’s beautiful. One day I was driving to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and I had to drive from Wyoming up through Nebraska. To my right, just outside Alliance, Nebraska, there were these structures. It looked like Stonehenge. They were these cars buried in the ground. I pulled over. I walked over to it, and it was “Carhenge.” Someone had buried cars, painted them gray. Someone had done this. They didn’t get paid to do this. It wasn’t a commission from anyone. Someone just did it. Someone had to make them. They were making their art. I wish that there were no pictures online, so that everyone who experiences this experiences it the way I did: out of the blue. Just the idea that someone could not be quiet, that people said, “What are you doing? Why are you doing that? Are you crazy?” But they did it, and that’s fantastic.

“Are you a writer?” And I say, “No, I’m a reader.”

What were your intentions with Huck and Jim’s friendship in your novel, and how does this relationship develop?

Huck’s expectations are the very expectations that put enslaved people in jeopardy. There are a lot of contradictions that work as irony. Jim is there, protecting Huck as they move through this world. And Huck is necessary to Jim. Jim cannot move through this landscape without Huck.

If he’s alone, he’s an escaped slave, and so he cannot move without Huck. That’s a weird kind of symbiotic relationship where you can carry the metaphor any way you like, and even as we find out, Huck feels betrayed when he finds out that Jim can speak in ways different from how Huck knows him. He’s whining, “We’re friends. Why didn’t you reveal this before?” And of course, the answer is, “I couldn’t.”

What parts of James’s character did you have to adapt or change from the original in order for his critiques of the structures in society like religion—to be believable and possible in the world?

When I first started, I thought I would be giving Jim agency, but I immediately abandoned the idea because Jim already had agency. What he didn’t have was a method of expressing, and that’s perhaps what I give him in this novel. What Jim in Twain’s novel does not have is this literacy. The philosophers who show up in Jim’s thinking are stand-ins for Thomas Jefferson and enlightenment figures. Jefferson didn’t leave any philosophical text, so there would be no text for him to be able to find in Judge Thatcher’s library where he teaches himself to read. But that’s the world of ideas that’s available to him in that library. One of the things that’s different from, say, South American slavery and North American slavery—and even Caribbean slavery— was that there were more revolts in South America and in the Caribbean

because there were more Muslims who shared stories. They had a religion that had a text that might not have been available to them—but did exist—and they understood that there was a Koran. And one of their teachings was that “you will not be enslaved.” And so there were more revolts. Here, the Tenets of Christianity were chosen to teach to the enslaved people things that would benefit slave owners. One of them was “you will have your reward in the end,” and you can see how that works to the advantage of someone who owns someone else: “Yeah, I know it really sucks now, but after this, it’ll be so much better.” Enslaved people didn’t buy that. They were much smarter than that.

What’s your publishing process? Do you have any advice for people who want to get published and want to start doing that?

Well, step one, write something. I think reading is the best thing for me. Falling in love with literature. I call it the American Idol syndrome. We have our culture. You see people who can’t sing at all. They get up and they try to sing, and then they get upset because somebody tells them they can’t. But why do they want to sing? They want to sing because they want to be a star. That’s not how you become a star. If you’re a painter, you love painting, and you go and you make your paintings. If it’s music, you learn to play an instrument, or you work on your voice. And you love listening. So fall in love with your art form.

Image 2: from left to right Alex Alfaro, Principal Ingrid Gustavson, Percival Everett, Kody Partridge, Carolyn Hickman, Sarah Gibbons, and Samuel Lu

Image 1: from left to right, Kody Partridge and Percival Everett

Tesserae Staff

Co-Editors-In-Chief

Evan Weinstein

Kendra Larson

Editors

Grey Obermark

Isabel Himoff

Interview Editors

Milo van Ispelen

Avalon O’Connell

Ada Tyser

Fatima Asad

Red-Footed Booby

Evan Weinstein

Photography

Submissions

We invite submissions from all students in the Rowland Hall Upper School. The creative writing class reviews submissions of art and literature, ranking each work according to aesthetic excellence. Works that receive the highest scores are included in the magazine.

Colophon

Editors have used InDesign for the layout. The cover of this book was printed on Sterline 80# dull cover with a floor dull UV coating. The body of the book was printed on sterling 80# dull text, 10% PCW. 400 books were printed.

Special thank you to mentors Joel Long, Dr. Lydia Jackson, and Rob Mellor for their invaluable artistic input and constant support.

Perspective

Gemma Ciriello Ink and Alcohol Marker