The documentary photographer Margaret Bourke-White once said: "Whatever facts a person writes have to be colored by his prejudice and bias. With a camera, the shutter opens and closes and the rays that come in to be registered come directly from the object in front of you." She was dead right about her first assertion; less so concerning the objectivity of the camera in the second. It is now commonplace knowledge that the creation of the artist's work, whether through the bristles of a brush, the mutability of clay, or the implacable viewfinder, are contingent upon the forces that shaped them. The writer is no different. Novelist Thomas Wolfe was the angel who looked homeward in his oeuvre purportedly from the emotional bruises he sustained and nurtured through his early years in North Carolina; James Baldwin's passionate and lyrical work sprung not only from his Harlem childhood but also his tortuous experiences as a Black, queer man in a pre-Civil Rights America; Jack Kerouac in a post-war America strove to push through the disillusionment and the straight-jacketed milieu of the 1950s and explored the western highways to discover and annunciate the freedom that was declared to be every American's birthright (a bright lie, if ever there was one) in On the Road (1957), a novel which famously ignited the wanderlust of generations to come, as Thoreau's Walden, published a century before, inspired various strains of DIY experiments in living still conducted to this day.

Vibrant voices all whose chords have not yet faded, these writers shaped language forged in the fire of their experience. The students published in the new issue of The Match Factory each follow this laudable tradition. Here you will find the sum of manifold experience. If the House of God has many mansions, as Jesus famously said, then the arboretum of art, in which a vast variety of trees flourish, contains a multitude of birds balanced on a multiplicity of branches, all singing their individual tunes, sometimes sweetly, sometimes in mourning, sometime harsh and discordant, and all so beautiful. 

Take the poetry produced by these talented young artists. In Schantelle Alonzo's "Old Country Buffet," we are given the poignant remembrance of an all-you-can-eat-joint, the surfeit of food heaped on plates the wordless expression of a father's love. In "Vultures" by Matias Grimoldi Calo, the carrion birds of the title set about attacking a buffet of another order in a fascinating panorama induced through precise bursts of language. Jasmine Watson's "Hide and Seek" is a stunning evocation of sorrowful memory, and Henry Plavidal's "Letter For a Slain Lover in Bakhmut" is a beautiful eulogy to a soul lost in the devastating war in Ukraine. 

The short stories published in this issue contain a number of surprises. In Bridget Ashvil's lyrical "To Make a Mountain," the heightened sensations of a mysterious intelligence is explored, reminiscent of the work of the Italian fantasist Italo Calvino. In Lindsay Campbell's excellently titled and suspenseful "The Jockey, the Woman, the House, the Horse," the narrator, lost in a manor turned maze, is haunted at every turn by taxidermied apparitions. Annie Coello's "Saudade" finds an undergraduate student, Marina, trapped in the elevator of her apartment building with the crisply named Joy Aristotle, and in Shiyuan Zhang's "Antipodes" a scientific researcher in the frosty regions of Argentina's Tierra del Fuego Province must confront a hideous monster that may or may not have sprung from the "antipodes" of her own warring unconscious.  

If you are interested in learning more about the world of literature (and as a Writing & Literature instructor at SVA, I hope that you are) you would do well to read the insightful analysis of Isabel Allende's magical realist novel The House of the Spirits by Alesia Brovtcyna, and Rania Mouawad's knowing immersion into Joan Didion's influential collection of essays The White Album. There is also challenging writing about art: Gina Lew's "Two Haystacks in Defiance of Heat Death" is a brief contemplation of mortality masked in a sharp exploration of Monet's deathless masterwork Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun) (1891), while Lexi Paulino's "AI and the Reflection of the Artist" is a timely and essential dive into the world of AI and how it will influence a variety of creative mediums in the future. If you've kept up with the news, and have seen Turkish artist Refik Anadol's hypnotic installation of MoMA, Unsupervised, then this essay will speak volumes to you. 

I would be remiss if I didn't shout out two lovely personal essays: Matthew Pagán's "Café Bustelo," a meditation on that famous Latino household staple, ever-present on kitchen tables, with writing as sweet as a tacita of that aromatic brew; and Kehan Sun's "Be a Pigeon," a poignant piece that compares the free-flying life of a pigeon to that of the human being--in this case a young student saddled with the responsibilities and social pressures attendant to one who lives in the modern metropolis.

This issue also proudly features the eclectic work of Xuan Chen, a BFA Illustration student at SVA, whose range and style of art astonishes. All of this, in addition to the writing of this year's winners of the annual school-wide undergraduate writing contest (congratulations to all!) makes for a smorgasbord of entertainment and delights. 

My heartfelt appreciation to Laurie Johenning, Director of Operations in the Humanities & Sciences Department, for all of her patient care and hard work in helping to put together this issue; and to Dr. Kyoko Miyabe, Chair of the Humanities & Sciences Department and the best all-around boss an employee could ever have; and to all of my colleagues at SVA, who tirelessly dredge the very best from their souls in order to illuminate the lives of the young students in their charge. What you do is important, for you are the ones who teach the students how to look at the world with new eyes, and armor them with the knowledge they need for their own battles in the always-challenging future. Have a fantastic summer everyone! 

Edwin Rivera, Writing & Literature Instructor, and Editor of The Match Factory