Dear Readers,
In March of this year, I went with the 12th Street editorial team to the New School Archives and Special Collections in order to better understand the historical context of our publication. There, I read the following in 1969 commencement speech for Parsons School of Design, delivered by renowned artist and designer, Emil Antonucci:
“What really astonishes me as I walk around New York City and travel in the United States, I look around, and the environment is getting uglier, more insane, more inhuman, than it has ever been. Somewhere along the line the designers have copped out. I hope that cop-out is limited to my generation. I suspect it is. One of the great benefits of teaching is the discovery that there is hope in people coming up.”
I found these words typewritten on old, yellowing paper inside a file folder labeled “Writings” and then “KELLEN DESIGN ARCHIVES”. I offer these fine details because you (yes, you!) can unearth this same typewritten, yellowing document from such a folder should you so choose. I encourage it.
I am neither a teacher nor a designer nor, if I’m being perfectly honest, a person who often describes herself as having “hope.” I am a student. I am a writer. And, I am rather more afflicted with dread about the state of the world and about the future in general than “hope.” So why then, when I visited the archives, was I searching for “hope?” Well, I like old things. And, when I am on the hunt for “hope,” as it were, I am more likely to look for it in the past than in the present. I’m just that kind of gal; Flea markets and antique stores are my places of reckoning.
It’s been a troubled couple of years. I am speaking as a student at The New School, one who endured the pandemic lockdown during my education here. Shortly thereafter, I endured the adjunct faculty strike of 2022. Each of these events brought to light some unsavory truths about this university, some which made national news, and some which, it seemed, were more-or-less catalytic for a handful more long-overdue uprisings within other academic institutions around the country. And then, finally, like a cute little adornment atop my messy time at The New School, I endured the short-lived student faculty strike of 2024. Any illusion of having come to a non-ugly, non-insane, non-inhuman university was nearly stricken from my mind over the course of these troubled years.
Nevertheless: a light in the dark! I joined this very literary journal and became its Editor-in-Chief in 2023.
That is why I went looking for hope. Suddenly, as a leader of this publication and of my peers who work on it, I felt a duty to reframe. Or, at least, to find a less hopeless way to trudge forward. So, I took us all to the flea market, so to speak. I tasked my team of editors—the wonderfully devoted and erudite team they are—with digging back in time to recover the character of this remarkable institution that drew us to it in the first place. Because it is, by the way, a remarkable institution.
What we found were artifacts—loads of them—proving the existence of many similarly problem-addled and “unprecedented” times. We found ad-hoc student publications tailor made to address those times. We found the work of writers whom we could relate to, students of yesteryear, who wrote and published their little poems and short stories in spite of the turmoil playing out in their respective eras. Take, for example, the era in which the first 12th Street Journal was published, May of 1944. “The Editors” of that very first edition of this journal wrote in their prospectus:
“Every new publication needs a raison d’etre, particularly in these times…”
The phrase “particularly in these times” stands out to me. It was the fifth year of WWII, mere weeks before D-Day. “The Editors” excluded the preposition “because…” after the phrase “particularly in these times,” an exclusion that was probably not lost on their readers in 1944.
Coincidentally, this same exclusion was not lost on Charlotte Slivka’s readers in 2016, the year of one of the most inflammatory presidential elections in US history, when Slivka, the Editor-in-Chief of 12th Street at the time, wrote in her Letter from the Editor the phrase “…this year especially so.”
And, the very same exclusion was not lost on Chloe Colvard’s readers in 2021 when she, the Editor-in-Chief of 12th Street during part of the pandemic lockdown, wrote in her Letter from the Editor the phrase “now, more than ever…”
Whether or not it would be lost on today’s audience—you! Yes, you!—if I were to invoke any one of these phrases sans explanation, sans the “because,” is not so much the point. The point, rather, has more to do with the raison d’etre. I don’t particularly care if writing or being a writer is important “particularly in these times,” “this year especially,” or “now more than ever,” because the through-line, from 1944 to today, regardless of the circumstances, is exactly the same demand to write. Perhaps this demand refers to the writer who won’t sleep until he gets his revolutionary idea on the page. Perhaps it’s the writer’s fervent call-to-action against injustice that sends her there. Or even, perhaps, the writer is drawn to eulogize a particularly rebellious owl who escaped Central Park Zoo and went on to become an icon of liberation and free will. Or it could be the writer’s story about getting a life-altering “boob job.” Or the one about their first time masturbating, and how that experience relates to, oh, I don’t know, their favorite work of art by Toulouse-Lautrec!
Each of the examples above is, by the way, the subject of an actual piece published by 12th Street Journal this year. I think these pieces of writing speak to the “now” in ways both nuanced and explicit. I think they speak to the “now” in ways that can be seen as inspiring should someone happen to dig them up many years in the future.
Though I must agree with Antonucci that things are “getting uglier, more insane, more inhuman,” I think the body of work in 12th Street this year is beautiful, lucid, and, always, unflinchingly human. I hope that such admirable qualities are not limited to my generation. I suspect they are not.
Until next time,
Taylor Syfan
Editor-in-Chief
2023-24