Dear reader,
While not being able to print our magazine was certainly an upsetting limitation, we engaged in exploring right along with our contributors to create a digital experience outside of our ordinary online pieces. Their work inspired us to take chances, to dive headfirst into the unknown, with the confidence that the journey would be worthwhile.
When we decided on this theme, we wanted to ask contributors one question: What have you been looking into, and what did you find? Our features editor Khadija Alam put it best when we were writing the call for pitches: she imagined our contributors taking a flashlight to illuminate a dark cave.
With Explore, we’ve created an online magazine whose theme is intertwined with the way you interact with it.
We invite you to delve into our website and allow yourself to wander through the various essays, poems, and photographs that our amazing creators have allowed us to publish.
The exploration of selfhood in relation to culture and location are highlighted in many of the wonderful pieces in this magazine. In “I’m not fearing anymore, nor shameful,” Laura Kim addresses the power of reconnecting to one’s culture and reminds us of the harm that forced assimilation causes to immigrants. Kim’s attention to family and culture through poetry and reflection inspires us to connect with our own histories and be proud of who we are. Meredith Blaise’s essay “Black blondes have more fun” speaks to a similar policing of identity that dehumanizes those who signify difference. Blaise reminds us that identity is never singular and that we must use this idea to dismantle white supremacy. Radmila Yarovaya’s piece parses out the tension of her cultural displacement, exploring her past and our collective present through a lens of agency and identity. Candice Zhang takes us through the dreamlike world of infinite choices, Saba Javed contemplates her entanglement with nostalgia, and Cassandra Hartmann’s piece speaks on the issue of explaining neurodiversity to a world that doesn’t recognize it.
Bronwyn Keough’s poem on childhood explores time and place as it relates to displacement, youth, and growth. During a time when many of us are forced to stay inside, Samuel Martin’s poem about a boy experiencing the world inside of his room asks what kind of meaning we can gather from our immediate spaces.
To explore also means to look at the ways in which life has changed during such an unprecedented time. In Adam Lam’s piece on COVID-19’s impact on Toronto’s coffee indutry, readers will learn about the damaging effects of this disease on small business. COVID-19 has affected other norms of life, and writers Mena Fouda and Janna Abbas will take you down memory lane exploring their past trips, and they give us hope for what we may be able to do in the future and the places we will be able to go. Accompanied by beautiful photographs, these are works not of despair or longing, but ones that cement memory into a catalyst for future dreams.
Our team here at The Strand helped us go on a journey which felt both new and familiar to us as editors and masthead members. As we navigate new situations together, it is this community of creatives that allows for innovation.
Thank you to our team, to our readers, and especially to our talented writers, for allowing us to explore these COVID-19 era avenues of creation, production, and publication, with you.
To our contributors especially: you are the reason we create, and you inspire us every day. Your stories are important, beautiful, and necessary, and we are so glad to be the avenue by which you chose to share them with.
Without our team here at The Strand, this journey would have been impossible. Thank you to Khadija Alam for her dedication, enthusiasm, and leadership.
Thanks to our web editor, Para Babuharan, for being our tech god and agreeing to make our—perhaps overly ambitious—dream come true. Thank you to our production manager Abbie Moser for keeping us on track throughout this new process. Thanks to Yoon-Ji Kweon and our passionate team of illustrators for their work, which allowed us to transfer the visual appeal of the magazine to a new format. And thank you as always to our resilient masthead for their support and dedication.
With that, open your mind and let the exploration begin!
Sincerely,
Ellen Grace and Hadiyyah Kuma, Co-Editors-in-Chief
