Issue 3: Nostalgia  ‧  November 2024

Nobody can truly understand the past except the people who lived it. Nostalgia is everywhere around us: the old uniforms, the old photos, the toys, the games and the music we listened to makes us long for the past while we were kids. Nostalgia, in essence, may have been associated with looking back in the past, but what if nostalgia isn’t what it means to be?

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Nostalgia is not the emotion that follows a longing for something you lost, or for something you never had to begin with, or that never really existed at all. It's not even, not really, the feeling that arises when you realize that you missed out on a chance to see something, to know someone, to be a part of some adventure or enterprise or milieu that will never come again. Nostalgia, most truly and most meaningfully, is the emotional experience—always momentary, always fragile—of having what you lost or never had, of seeing what you missed seeing, of doing what you missed doing, and of meeting the people you missed knowing. 
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In this issue, this is the kind of work I hope you will find in these pages. I hope, also, that you will find a commitment to the values we defined in this magazine for the past issues we already published: a respect for plurality of lived experience and a desire to forge connections across disciplines, by bringing writing and arts (from credited artists) together on a page. May the perspective, the writing of it all, offered here—poetic, narrative and prose that reimagined nostalgia—reminds us to write what holds us to feel this way.

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To end, I am grateful to our contributors for sharing them, and to you, reading their work.

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CLUAIDH VUONG

Editor-in-Chief