The summer began with me searching a dusty drawer for an KN-95 mask that would fit my kid’s face—this time, to protect against abysmal AQI that coated the northeast in a gray film blotting out the sun. “This time,” I said to my bewildered child, “you wear it outside, but you can take it off inside.” I am very much the same mom of three years ago, watching a fresh crisis unfold and placing my faith in science. I shouldn’t have re-watched Don’t Look Up the other night. I should take screen breaks before bed. But, the world right now is very hot, very pink (Pantone 219C), and caught in a phantom nostalgia for the aughts, or the 90s, or a gilded age—I cannot tell exactly.

But it still seems like we’ve avoided grappling with the grief of the last three years.

This will be my last issue with Triangle House Review and I’ve been reflecting on the events that brought me here. (See below for how to apply for the assistant editor position!) At the end of 2019, I moved to rural Connecticut with my husband and two kids. I uprooted my life, then three months later the world uprooted itself and everything changed and then was eerily still.

I wrote into that void and I still felt alone but purposeful. I breastfed my toddler incessantly (my body was always around!), consulted remotely in electronic discovery (aka data in a litigation), and speed-shopped at a natural grocery store in Woodbury. At night, I applied to fiction writing workshops and caught up on planetary magic homework from my astrology courses. There was always YouTubeKids blaring in the background and I was always affronted by—yet always trying to avoid—my family.

I met our fearless editor Monika Woods at the first (maybe only?) virtual zoom-Tin House of 2020. I met a lot of other writers, novelists from Miami and Texas, and the void became a tenanted place. I began working on issues of THR, learning issue by issue, post by post, what it takes to birth a literary magazine issue into the floating online landscape anchored by Twitter, mostly. But time has eaten even Twitter.

It is apt then that the theme of this issue is The Past marking 5 years of THR. In Lara Atallah’s poems, the past is a reckoning where the heady sensation of watching fireworks explode conjures US imperialism. We are actually frozen in time in the The Abandoned Covid Year Interview between Miranda Popkey and Monika. Between Little Women and Barbie, we’ve less revisited the past than we are caught in a Greta Gerwig time loop, which is OK. I prefer the Gerwig-verse to the Meta-verse.

But time alters everything. In Leah Abrams’ Meatspace Pastoral, the protagonist is transformed into a form of unwieldy proportions which finally affirms her utility. Lucas Iberico Lozada’s critique of Kafka is not of his well-known story The Metamorphosis—but of his diaries which were published against his explicit posthumos instructions. It begs the question of how much control we have over our archives and what will or won’t outlive us.

To that, we’ve got Awash—first published on our blog in 2020—which revisits the history of bathhouses in Manhattan through a queer lens. Amanda Chen’s criticism takes a tour through Berlin tracing the evolution of the rave scene. The year-long interview between our editor Becca Schuh and Marlowe Granados loops back to a time of “Obama-era-basic” as the two writers discuss the economics and expectations of growing up in an industry fraught with the weight of itself.

Trevor Quirk’s essay Tryhard reflects on the friendship and legacy of a mentor. Billie Watson’s Egg is a story woven from a moment in the past that changes the trajectory of one family. Shareen K. Murayama’s poem Circa ponders the nature of extinction.

The art by Renée Jarvis paints dreamscapes as blurred and bright as memory itself.

It’s 2023 and we are all obsessed with the future (AI, UAP, changing political world order) but the past seems a good thing to apprentice. Not for nostalgia, I am not a fool for older years simply because they happened sooner. But the past is a map, and we should study it into the next world-changing thing.

Want to be an editor at THR?

With these editorial changes, we're looking to bring a few new people onto our team. Our issues consist of ten pieces—two each of fiction, poetry, criticism, and essays, plus two interviews between writers. We’re looking for people who are interested in working cross-genre, with a special emphasis on non-fiction. Triangle House is a great way to get involved in literary publishing alongside a full-time job, or for people who have published in lit mags and are curious about transitioning to editorial. Some experience is a plus, but we’re not dogmatic about what that experience is. This is not intended to be a full-time job, rather a supplementary position for someone who either works in the literary industry and wants experience working within a more experimental venue, or works outside of the literary industry and hopes to gain experience working within it. 

The qualifications for this position are as such: an understanding of the contemporary literary landscape, excitement for editing prose, proficiency within Google Docs, familiarity with the Triangle House oeuvre, and organizational skills. 

To get an idea of what we publish, please refer to our back issues, and if you think your tastes align with ours, we'd love to hear from you. 

For the application, please submit:

• A resume;

• A cover letter that:

• Tells us about yourself, your taste, what you like to read

• Tells us your favorite pieces from the THR archive and why

• Names 3-5 current writers you’d try to solicit if you were selected for the position
  

SEND APPLICATIONS TO: monika@triangle.house

INCLUDE the subject line: THR EDITOR