Dear Solstice Readers,
In my introduction to the Winter 2024 issue I wrote about the importance of memory for writers. However, currently in the public sphere much of our communal memory, our history, is being obliterated. Or rewritten. Whole swaths of people are disappearing from the public record: women, Blacks, Native Americans – anyone who is not white and male. And some are bringing back the practice of honoring traitors who took up arms against our country to preserve their heinous right to own other humans.
There are now words that have earned official public disapprobation and condemnation. In some cases, what passes for governmental voices at the national level have called the use of these words illegal and programs based on the concepts behind these words as fraudulent. One is reminded of Orwell’s 1984, where ownership and distortion of language predicates the servitude of the people.
Now there are words that are banished or that will evoke calls of fraudulence and illegality, among them: advocacy, BIPOC, diversity and inclusion and equity (in any form of these words), marginalized, underserved, underrepresented.
If you take a look, Solstice’s mission is littered with a lot of these forbidden words (https://solsticelitmag.org/our-mission/). The movement of the moment, the official dictum from our government on high, is the eradication of factions of society they do not like, but one faction in particular. They call it “wokeness,” but if one had the choice to either sleepwalk through life with nary any consciousness and nary any conscience, I’d pick a thousand times over being alive and awake. There is no other way to experience life’s joys as well as life’s pains but by being fully cognizant. That’s the basis of being alive. That’s the whole purpose of life. The alternative is to be asleep, to be comfortably numb, to be everything more similar to being a rock than a human.
Solstice stands behind its belief that “probing into diversity can promote unity” and that we will not shirk from presenting “colliding, diverse, sometimes controversial, points of view.” We are a community of writers, hoping to be as expansive and inclusive as we can to make the messiness of life come alive. We will not remove certain words, and the ideas behind them, from our vocabularies. This is who we are and we will not nullify our existence. We will remain steadfast. Non serviam. To remain silent is to remain complicit. Solstice will not remain silent.
Gian Lombardo
Editor-in-Chief
Gian Lombardo taught publishing for 23 years at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. He directs Quale Press, which mainly publishes prose poetry. His books include the prose poetry collections Start of Something Beautiful (2023), Bricked Bats (2021), Machines We Have Built (2014), Who Lets Go First (2010), Aid & A Bet (2008), Of All the Corners to Forget (2004), Sky Open Again (1997), Before Arguable Answers (1993), and Standing Room (1989), as well as the poetry collection Between Islands (1984). In 2022, his translation of Louis Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot appeared. Other of his translations include Michel Delville’s Anything & Everything (2016), Archestratos’s Gastrology or Life of Pleasure or Study of the Belly or Inquiry Into Dinner (2009), Michel Delville’s Third Body (2009) and Eugène Savitzkaya’s Rules of Solitude (2004).
