Contrast lit mag cover, 2012

Letter from the Editor

This piece was originally published in Contrast, McDaniel College's student-run literary magazine, where I was editor in 2012. I was about to graduate, and this letter was something of a goodbye.

The image we used for the cover is a Photochrom print of drifting ice near Spitsbergen Island, Norway. Photochrom is a type of lithograph that was popular for a very short time around the dusk of the 19th century, around the time the Columbian Exposition in Chicago made technology sexy. According to the Library of Congress, the cover image was made sometime between 1890 and 1900. Photochrom was used largely on postcards, usually depicting sprawling landscapes, exotic flora, or majestic architecture—you know, predictable bullshit. This image, however, shows us very nearly nothing, just ice floating serenely in the water, imitating the clouds above. The picture is beautiful because it is in contrast.

Contrast. Get it? I have been clever.

In the fall, we had a writing contest where all the entries had to start with "I remember" and end with "it was beautiful." I came up with the idea because I thought it would be fun to make people work around an extremely cheesy prompt, but as I consider the image of ice drifting in that Photochrom postcard, I can't help but conjure up a cheesy, sentimental thought or two of my own. That postcard was made well over a hundred years ago; anyone who bought on is long gone by now. But the image still exists. The memory is alive.

The contest yielded some of the best student writing I have seen in four years of workshops and readings. (Check out the winners in the back of this magazine.) These writers took a cheesy premise and made it hilarious, unsettling, engrossing, and wholly original. That's the kind of thing that will make me miss Contrast. It's not just this magazine. It's a creative community, a community I will be leaving upon graduation. But the magazine will take up permanent residence on my bookshelf. The memories will live on amid its pages.

—Ed