Letter from the Editor
Dear Barnstorm Readers,
Recently, to celebrate the beginning of the holidays, I went to the opening night of the Slutcracker with a group of people I’d never met before. The show, a burlesque version of the Nutcracker, had adapted the plot of the original ballet ingeniously. The dancing was so gorgeous and mesmerizing that the various wardrobe malfunctions and brief digressions into slapstick humor barely detracted from the show. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
Though the performance was spectacular in every sense of the word, what I enjoyed most about the evening wasn’t the show itself, but the unique and fascinating character dynamics of the group of people I saw it with. After the show, we went back to the host’s house and fell into a revealing conversation about how we choose to engage with film. The host said she never watches movies. Instead, she watches the trailer and then reads the wikipedia summary, which she said gives her all the information she needs to know. In response, the host’s sister announced that she does watch movies, but only when she’s doing something else at the same time and only at 1.5 speed. To get through them faster, she explained.
My initial reaction was to think, these people are crazy. Warm and engaging and a lot of fun to be around, but crazy. I wondered, what’s the point of engaging with art if we skip or fast forward through all the parts that make it meaningful? I engage with art because I want to be moved. I engage with art because it puts me in touch with humanity in a way that nothing else does.
But later I got to thinking about the ways that I, too, fast forward through life. I often rely on microwaveable food so that I don’t have to spend my time cooking. A lot of the tasks that I spend my time doing, I think of as work that I need to get out of the way so that I can move on to something else. Sometimes it feels like I’m rushing through life in order to carve out time to consume media, and even then I find ways to expedite the process. How many of us watch those 3 minute Instagram reels all the way through to the end? How often do any of us watch movies with zero distractions?
But when I think back to the most meaningful moments I’ve experienced in the past year, they were all when I was taking the time to deeply engage with art, my community, or my surroundings. I think about the slam poetry event I went to last spring, when I felt my heart hammering in my throat from the wild catharsis of the performance. I think about the ballet I attended this summer which, without language or plot, described love and loss so articulately that I still get chills thinking about it. I think about how exhilarating it was this fall to discover the fiction of Sean Thor Conroe, and to rediscover the poetry of E. E. Cummings, right at a time when I was feeling particularly jaded.
The December issue of Barnstorm, therefore, is an argument in favor of engagement. Perhaps you won’t find yourselves connecting to these works. That’s okay! The search for the things that speak to us is a beautiful thing, regardless of how often it yields results. But perhaps you’ll find yourself moved by the artistry of the language in Katie Mihalek’s poem “Period,” or by the way the gentle narrator of Shayne Langford’s “Eggs” navigates a brutal childhood. And perhaps you’ll find kinship in Lana Spendl’s meditative “Multitude of Hosts,” in which she shows how much she understands the importance of engaging with the present moment, in however small a way.
I hope that you are able to spend long enough with these pieces to discover whether they speak to you, and give them the time and space to move you if they do. Happy reading, and happy holidays.
Warmly,
Aspen Kidd
Editor-in-Chief