Letter from the Editor
Dear Alumni,
As founding editor of the F&M Alumni Arts Review, I’m delighted to take this opportunity to say how much I look forward to reading and to seeing your work.
The theme of the inaugural issue is TURNING POINTS. We are often moved to lift our pen, our camera, our paintbrush, when we’re stirred by a shift in our lives, when we sense that one aspect of our existence is coming to a close and another, not yet clear, is opening. These moments, and many are delicate, hardly discernible at the time they occur, bloom, shift, turn into the next part of our lives.
The word turn, in addition to having multiple meanings, has a derivation that seems particularly apt: it hearkens back through Middle English to Old English to the Latin: to turn on a lathe, from the Greek LATHE, a tool that made circles, or “rounded off.” And isn’t that so often what a turning does? We come to a place in our lives where we are aware, however ephemerally, that the road is curving and we can’t quite see around the bend. Yet we know we’re “rounding off” even as we’re in the process of moving on.
This describes my own situation as we launch this new enterprise. I arrived at Franklin & Marshall three years ago as a visiting professor of creative writing. Although I’ve taught creative writing for years, through conferences, extension courses, and private workshops, I was new to academia. And while I also have an extensive resume as a freelance editor, and careers in both writing and theatre arts, that first semester at F&M I kept waiting for the “learning curve” to actually curve! I was constantly learning and much of the time felt as if I was trekking straight uphill. To my delight, F&M invited me to stay a second year, and then a third. Each of these invitations caused another “turn on the lathe,” having to do with pedagogy, friendships, and even the word home, which, because I also own a house in California, has become a somewhat fluid word.
And here is yet another turning, as I take hold of the helm of the F&M Alumni Arts Review. I feel fortunate: You remember this beautiful campus, the marvelous variety of trees that even in winter provide solace and pleasure. Although some buildings may have been added or renovated since your tenure here, you’ll certainly recall the cherished silhouette of Old Main. You can cast your mind over late nights of study, laughter with friends, the moment of discovery to which you were led by a beloved professor.
I’m glad to be part of all this, to work with talented and thoughtful students (who will, soon enough, join you as alumni), and cherished colleagues. As I turn to greet the adventures and challenges that await around this curve, and the next, I’m aware of both a rounding off and an opening out. I hope you’ll be inspired to examine your own “turnings,” whether it’s a photograph taken 20 years ago or an essay you begin to write this afternoon. Send along that essay, that photograph, your stories and paintings and poems. I look forward to seeing them all.
Sands Hall
Editor
