Charlotte Greenizen

Introduction

We live in a culture with Olympic-level distractions – 500 channels on satellite TV, web logs, podcasts, cell-slash-camera phones with text messaging, PDAs, MP3s, and GPSs – who has the time to follow the muse? Who has the time or the inclination to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, brush to canvas? The term multi-tasking is not just for corporate executives brokering big deals but seems to describe the way most of us function day to day. We are most grateful, then, for our campus community members who put distractions aside and turn on their internal GPSs.

Author Joan Didion once said, “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it….” Our writers, poets, and artists lay claim to their places and render them in various forms.

When Nicole Cook experiences the seedier side of London with “Charlie Ray,” Ed DeMattia witnesses a tribal Indian ceremony, Jenny Brown encounters poverty on the streets of Guatemala, or Katherine FitzGerald meets Vietnamese culture in a most tragic and untimely way, we connect.

When we consider the ancient and imaginary places suggested in the collages of artist Graham Davey, see the shape of dead winter in Ann Clark Moore’s “Winter Heat,” or realize a deeper connection to community with Andrew T. Fargo’s “Boundaries,” we understand the value of place.

We thank our talented contributors; we thank our readers, too.

Click this link to return to the Main Page/Table of Contents