Spring 2023 / Summer 2023

Letter from the Editorial Board

“Your dad got a flathead around here? This doorknob is just going to fall out again if we don’t tighten these screws.”

I checked the cupboards and drawers in the kitchen. “He’s got… a meat skewer?” I said, holding up what looked like a fork with an extremely long neck and two sharp prongs. “Well if it works…,” Alex said, taking the skewer and examining the width of the prongs, comparing them to the screwheads. He shook his head with a light smile and indicated for me to help.

I held the knob on the inside of the door while he attempted to turn the skewer’s handle, pushing the prongs into the small grooves of each screw. After a minute, the keyhole cover and knob were once again flush with the sunbeam yellow paint of the door. Alex spun the skewer in his hands, satisfied. “Well if it works…” he said again, this time with a grin.

The theme of this edition is “Balance.” To me, this story represents precisely how this theme can manifest in daily life. Balance has always been an interactive process for me—one in which we are always adapting to the circumstances around us, attempting to achieve the desired outcome. The desired outcome can be seen as representing the state of balance and the pursuit of that outcome is adaptation. It is exceptionally rare that balance is ever permanent. It is perhaps easier to think of it as a constant work in progress—even if achieved, it may not be for long.

(—Matthew L. Garrell, Editor-in-Chief)

Balance was selected organically from the central elements represented in each story. Furthermore, the theme of balance was a driving force behind the arrangement of our journal. We wanted a cover-to-cover read through to feel natural, effortless—balanced. We present to you a journey, a garden path where each stepping stone takes you further from where you began, but takes you where, perhaps, you didn’t know you wanted to go. We begin with the infinity of space with “A Galaxy” before coming to Earth in a series of pieces that have a global perspective, raising important questions about one’s place in relation to everything else, questions about the machinations of the world, and questions of the daily, of the concrete, and of “the mundane,” as author Howard Carter puts it. “On Loving Lions” takes a surrealist approach at those same questions, but also reminds us to cherish what it is we love in the world, pivoting us into a bright and colorful section, filled with surreal imagery, whimsy, and enjoyment, before finally bringing us back to ourselves, focusing on memories, reflections, and asking, “what if we dared to be beautiful, despite it all?” Finally bringing us to a close is “Elephant Trunk Nebula” and “Birth to Death,” returning us once again to the infinity of space we came from at the start, and reminding us that life and its cycles are ultimately always in Balance.

The sub-themes of this edition—global perspectives, surrealist visions, and memories/reflections—might not seem like direct descendants of the term “balance” at first glance, but they all address shifts, seasons, and circles in their own way. For the spring edition of the journal, it felt pertinent to turn our attention towards our place here in Hanover, as in the poem “First Spring.” The river ice was melting as submissions came in, and the crabapple trees are now in bloom as we send the full edition out to print. But our community is made up of students from all over the world, and through their writing we also see outward, far beyond our little valley, in works like “Gran Vía” and “The Persian Phoenix / Simurgh Rising.” We hold both ways of looking, near and far, present and past, this home and that home. It is not such a leap, then, to look from the expanse of the world we recognize into the realm of the irreal, where bodies transform, colorful, sensorial dreams come alive, and where the kitchen appliances in “Last One Standing” would like to have a word with you. These works invite you in with the tangible and familiar before carrying you away with their imagination, coming and going like the season for lilacs. The themes then gradually descend from flights of fancy back down to the trees, the flowers, the water, down to a conversation and a cup of tea in “Tea with Peggy.” The bright colors of spring lead to the heat of summer and lastly to the first cool nights of fall, as in “She said, Last September.” We turn inwards, recalling lessons learned, like those our protagonist learns in “Wishing Well.” But the complexity of the interior inevitably mirrors that of the exterior, casting our sights back to the big questions that set us on our path in the beginning of the journal. We toss the pennies back into the well, the ends of the circle meet, and it all starts over; our hope being that you can return to this edition again and again, and each time the words will be the same, but different.

This edition was unprecedented in how many members of the MALS community came together to pull it off. MALS is an eclectic program, and the journal demonstrates both the beauty and the difficulty that come from eclecticism. With the pandemic, many of Clamantis's operations turned remote and asynchronous but this edition saw editors come together in person to train, discuss, disagree, and collaborate. It was chaotic, even painful at times, but more voices were heard than ever before and many previously obscured processes were revealed, rethought, and streamlined. And in the end, we have a volume 1 issue 14 that we are proud to present to the MALS community. There is still much work to be done but we have accomplished more than many thought possible in one edition, and we could not have come this far without our readers. Thank you for your support as we continue to build Clamantis.

The Clamantis Board
-- Matthew, Jasmine, Lilabeth, Erin, Sanyukta, Maria, and Anmol
June 2023