quarterlife is:
sunroom
editors-in-chief
heleana backus
anna johnston
copy editors
editor: natalie flaherty
victoria helmer
hanna lynch
chloe williams
web development
editor: hannah marker
beth kutina
livvy eickerman
devi payne
mei smith
art
editor: sylvie corwin
chloe french
elie flanagan
antara bird
ally kim
audrey mace
public relations
editor: bridget o'brien
paige sorgen
iris thwaits
alanna moore
eva sullivan
gilda barnes
volume 15 issue 2
Fall 2020
quarterlife is a literary journal published four times a year that features poetry, short fiction, drama, creative nonfiction, analytic essays, alternative journalism, and any other sort of written work Whitman students might create, as well as sketches, drawings, cartoons, and prints. Each issue is composed around a given theme that acts as both a spark for individual creativity and a thematic axis for the issue.
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quarterlife is an exercise in creative subjectivity, a celebration of the conceptual diversity of Whitman students when presented with a single theme. Each piece is ostensibly unconnected but ultimately relevant to the whole. Every work illuminates a different aspect of the theme. In this way, quarterlife magazine participates in the writing process. The magazine is not an indifferent vehicle by which writing is published, but rather is a dynamic medium with which writing is produced.
letter from the EDITORS
dear reader,
We originally chose sunroom as the theme for the fourth issue of last year, which, as the state of the world changed, became the quarantine issue. As we spent month after month alone in rooms and in unpredictable situations, we returned to the idea of a sunroom both as an escape from quarantine and as a vehicle for reimagining our secluded spaces.
The sunroom that we built this semester is entirely different from the sunroom we would have built last semester; it reaches for warm nooks, spiraling plants, comfortable pets, and finding joy within enclosed spaces, while encapsulating the feeling of being in a room of windows, where the state of the outside world is constantly present, visible, and worrying. sunroom is a collection of sunny moments, reminders of the not-so-sunny times we live in, and pieces that reinterpret confusion and distress into clarity. And in quarterlife’s new online format, the issue itself is a portable sunroom, an illuminated space we can share from afar.
We hope it brings sunlight to the window of your computer screen.
Sincerely,
Anna + Heleana