Maren Wong

Varya Lyapneva

I was born and raised in Russia — the country whose borders contain the biggest plot of land within them. Growing up, this knowledge was a given and a point of pride.

Russia is now at the center of geopolitical discussions, more than it has been for quite some time. The country placed itself in mouths and headlines worldwide by launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — making many of us young Russians look back at our history more critically than we ever had before. We are looking back with fear for the history of which we are a part, but we know that we need to keep looking.

How did Russia grow so big, stretching across eleven time zones for 9000 kilometers? On such a heterogeneous plot of land, what unites us? Does anything? Tragically, it took full-blown violence to set off these strings of thoughts. I am lucky never to have had my belonging or right to home questioned by the tyrannical ruling power in Russia.

So when this issue’s theme — Land — was proposed last semester, I latched on to it immediately. Knowing that every space is contested and that every struggle is a version of another one, and, thus, that our theme could serve as strong connective tissue across geographies and experiences, I had big hopes for this production cycle. One of them was to find those ties among the pieces in the issue that clarify my judgment of Russia’s tremendous terrains. Another - to learn about concealed land-caused pains. Another - to find, despite the parallels between all struggles over land, what makes each of them matchless.

In our solicitation message for this issue, we wrote that “

 is thinking about land” this semester. But of course, it is us, students of the 

, who keep returning to this concept — some of us weekly in board meetings, some daily, some never stop thinking of it. What a blessing we have, to turn our focus toward and away from land — land as an intellectual curiosity, as a deeply exciting topic, as a novel perspective on the world. But then there is a need for some of us to wake up and go to sleep, concerned and aware; for others, livelihoods are engulfed in contestations over land; others don’t enjoy the privileges of citizenship on “neutral soil” and are irreversibly hurt by the status quo.

 is in a unique position: sustained by our own efforts, but also by Harvard College, we benefit from the stability that few publications enjoy. And so we carry the weight of Harvard’s institutional legacy, of crimes against land and the people who inhabit it. As we considered all things land this semester, we found that this issue must not only house our perspectives and uplift artistic expression on campus but also be offered humbly and compassionately to those for whom land is a matter of survival.

I have long discarded my national pride and started doubting if I have ever been proud. These days, I am embarrassed to simplify growth and resulting hugeness to the point of unquestionable achievement. In the Land Issue, I find similar doubts. Why is a giant country, connected so faintly, by stamps and trains, yet hopelessly unwavering? How do we define the relationship between living things: humans and land, both of whom are strong characters and diligent laborers? Am I uniquely intimate with the landscape? And thus, am I always or never alone? This issue has brought me great joy, as all these questions — that we learn are unanswerable and, thus, meaningless — were not only asked but also debated with passion.

The final product is not without its shortcomings. We took upon this project knowing that it is ambitious, inexhaustible, and disputable. But this semester, I am very proud of the 

. I am proud of my friends and colleagues behind this name, for their curiosity and drive, for approaching with urgency and empathy, and for devoting a lot of time to our Land Issue. This issue is, I hope, one of many steps towards an 

 that serves the pursuit of justice through our fundamental means: visual and literary arts.

We bought a new outfit for my appearance in the climate change documentary. It wasn’t a decision so much as a necessity: I had arrived fully clad in black; my head seemed to float above my body, which had disappeared into the green screen I was being shot against; this called for a new outfit color. My mother ran to the nearby children’s shop while Amy, the show’s producer, had me remove my shoes and untie my hair to hang down my back. I was barefoot and ethereal looking by the time my mother returned with a skirt and shift in virginal blue.

A year later, when the documentary aired, we had already discarded both skirt and shift: trash that nevertheless survives eternally in a video of me singing Tom Chapin’s 

 — followed by a montage of turtles choking on garbage in a sea once ethereal blue.

 was a documentary about kids, for kids: a Gen-Z paean against climate change, mildly star studded (Liam Neeson, Tina Fey, and Laura Dern all made appearances), with the tenor of an enthusiastic acceptance speech (Us! Yes, us! We’re going to save the world! Thank you and please donate!) from a diverse cast of real-life children, whom 

.” Our anthem, the documentary’s theme song, was the 

The earth is our one home
The earth is so fragile it seems
It's warmer and warmer
And things have gone from strange to extreme
And then the kids took over
That's when the future began

That future was now, and that future was orchestrated by preteens. Critically, no documentary participant had outgrown middle school. Everyone had an adorable lisp, cringey braces, or a face studded with acne. My right foot tapped nervously as I sang, lips shaped in a taut 

 unless the lyrics called for the clearly enunciated 

 I had learned in voice lessons. My older brother, Ben, sat upright at the piano, leaning soulfully into the keyboard whenever the harmony resolved.

Amy, a parent at our elementary school, had plucked Ben and I from the school talent show — he, fourteen, an amateur climate enthusiast; I, eight, unsure if I liked to be outdoors — and plopped us back into the school auditorium that was now transformed into an HBO set. Ben played as I sang:

This pretty planet
Spinning through space
My garden, my harbor, my holy place
Golden sun going down
Gentle blue giant
Spin us around
All through the night
Safe till the morning light

 did not, in fact, follow Chapin’s original lyrics. Unintentionally I had changed them: from “

You’re a garden / you’re a harbor / you’re a holy place”

My garden / my harbor / my holy place.”

 Through this pronoun switch-up I had inadvertently transformed the song from a grateful ballad to a statement of ownership.

My lyrical mishap was only fitting. By Google Search, 

 is billed: “From the children who will inherit the planet, comes a collection of songs, activism, and heartfelt tips for protecting the earth.” Not yet fifteen, we received our inheritance: this pretty planet. Unified by our youth, we could never squander such wealth.

For ours was a very particular fantasy: that before we were old enough to vote, to breathe smoke from illicit cigarettes, to brush up against grief in joy’s clear waters, to tumble into love on a warm December night and out in a freezing July, Generation Z would rescue a planet about which we knew little — save that it was “ours,” and that we had very limited time.

When I think of New York City I think of the things that fall on it. Hosewater trickling through the caulk between sidewalks on fresh April mornings. Snow plows scraping white from the streets like crust from a thermos’ rubber rim. Gingko nuts that stink more than bird shit. Home in New York is a tightly-zipped pocket of sky or an unyielding plot of concrete. Land in New York is not soil but the thick layer of fallen residue that rises to meet the sky from which it fell.

I grew up in that city, and so compiling this issue has been a lesson for me in other ways of knowing land. Andrew Q. Kang ‘27 leads us through an unnamed city in his short story “Quiltro,” shadowing a dog’s kaleidoscopic view. Mohsid Hamid describes Lahore’s changing climate in an interview with Imaan Mirza ‘25. In an interview with Varya Lyapneva ‘26, Jumana Manna speaks of urbanization eroding earth’s soils as surely as colonial power corrodes the minds of the powerful, as mold eats through bread crusts in Manna’s 

In other stories, land is synonymous with house. The narrator in Rosalind Margulies’s “the maneater” promises to shoot the beast stalking Shady Acres retirement community, in exchange for allowance to continue living in his late grandfather’s house. Taylor Dorrell photographs an old man standing by his clapboard house in shirtless contrapposto. A dog with a gun bullies his owner into housebound seclusion in Christopher Wilson’s “The Bad Dog.”

Sometimes, plan replaces land, as in “The Machine That Makes the Machine”: Annika Inampudi ‘25 writes of her grandparent’s home in the meticulously plotted town surrounding a heavy electricals factory in Nehru’s India. In a chapter from Ishmael Reed’s upcoming novel “The Terrible Fives,” a necrophiliac named Termite Control plans to reshape America’s mortuary landscape when he becomes President of the United States. Sama Alshaibi describes making art with teenage girls at the Dheisheh refugee camp in Palestine, nurturing creativity in the face of planned destruction.

Frank Y.C. Liu ‘26 takes a transcontinental train ride. The earth is stitched with steel; humans flee, and land grows back around the stitches, inflamed with new life. In an interview with Liu, Homi K. Bhabha questions the geographic reach of postmodernity. “Rain Comes After She Dies,” Denise Low tells us. In her poem “Waldens,” McGowin Grinstead ‘26 swims in debt through a lake at the margins of her life.

Our garden, our harbor, our holy place — we think of land as something we own, something to be possessed; ownership licenses our irresponsibility. The stories enclosed engage that irresponsibility. They also engaged me to reflect on my own.

More than ten years ago now, I appeared in a documentary against global warming, costumed in the future’s trash: an outfit I would discard less than a year after purchasing it. Later I littered the Internet with candy-colored infographics. I spread awareness. The personal is political, and poetry is not a luxury but a means of action: weaned on the doctrines of second-wave feminism, I politicized my writing. Concurrently I aestheticized my politics. My friends and I thrifted new outfits to wear to climate rallies: red tube tops (a powerful color, a call to action!), casual light wash jeans, haloes of stick-on gems around our eyes. I remember little from those rallies other than the photos we shot for Instagram, the proselytizing captions that guilted others in order to deflect our own shame.

, youth was a promise. To many adults, “the youth” are an undifferentiated and self-perpetuating mass onto which one can perpetually foist responsibility to compensate for one’s own lack thereof. It’s natural to blame the parents. But it was I who spent my childhood performing climate justice, even as I contributed to its increasing improbability. Youth became my excuse — one that becomes increasingly harder to brandish.

Sweeping statements like “the kids will save the world” manufacture a superficial coherence premised on shared youth. This fantasy of unity elides real differences in lived experience, of climate change and many other things. But I believed in this fantasy. I lived it, until I was no longer a child, and it was abundantly clear that Gen-Z had failed to save the world before the age of twenty-one. Self deception nibbles at the soul as mold consumes bread — until stale ideology dries the mouth, encrusts the tongue, halts speech.

Coming out of this fantasy I was lucky to find the 

 — colleagues and friends who invite all to share in their curiosity.

Here is our offer: a thick packet of stories, broad in its scope and by no means exhaustive, that speaks not to unity but to the universality of difference. The pocket of sky in which I conducted my childhood years is not the same pocket in or under which you conducted yours. We will read the same stories differently. As we read, we will reflect on our own separate lives, and responsibility will fall with varied weight on varied individuals.

Here is my hope: that we are able to accept the responsibility that falls on each of us, and rise through our own self-deceptions, firmly planted on the land beneath our feet.

Fall 2024 - Land

Editor's Notes

Editor's Note: Land Issue

The winter of our freshman year was subsiding into a long chill drizzle when Hugo, Varya and I decided to go treasure hunting.

 earlier that fall, and had recently begun our term as Pegasi, hosting all manner of arts and literary events at 21 South Street. Varya and Hugo were a beautiful blonde pair of best friends, intimidatingly cultured and European. If you had asked me to describe, in the Greco-Roman style, which of us formed which portion of a Pegasus’ body, I would certainly have called myself the butt. Unfailingly thoughtful and kind, my new friends were always proposing clever ideas for the magazine: launch parties and zines, wine nights with themes like “the virgin mary’s annunciation” and flea markets where acquaintances of theirs sold clay ashtrays or played the flute. They were tapped into a campus arts community I was just beginning to be aware of.

Game as I was to plan and host, I found myself perpetually dismayed by the house at 21 South. I felt it was a place that one must love either very little, or with one’s whole being: little enough to not despair at the house’s disrepair, or wholly enough that despair crescendoed to a point of action.

I was inclined to despair. I had joined the

 to write; I didn’t have a vision for the organization beyond the point of my pen. Varya and Hugo were art connoisseurs with developed taste, and saw what the house could become if lovingly restored. Their despair had bubbled over into a cheery, planful optimism. I admired their spunk; but even if I hadn’t, as Pegasus hindquarters, I was compelled to follow suit whenever they took to the skies.

And so our treasure hunt began. We haven’t paused since.

Beginning in the “banana room,” we worked our way through the downstairs. Menstrual cup: check. Expired Benadryl: check. Baby boot: check. 21 South yielded its junk reluctantly. Most of it was glued together by unidentifiable Franzia-scented sludge and coated in a similarly sticky dust.

Consequently, we were surprised when the discoveries began. As stingy as Mother Advocate was with her hoard, she was liberal with her secrets. Amidst heaps of issues from 2020 we found a thick blue card inviting us to a debutante ball thirty years past. Chagrined to have missed the RSVP deadline, we kept searching and were soon rewarded: buried in the President’s desk were the minutes from the executive board meeting during which members agreed to admit women among their ranks – but not let them hold office!

Treasure hunting in our building was not a linear sort of time travel but a looping, cyclical one: a tidbit discovered just twenty minutes prior would match perfectly with another presently grasped in one’s hand – but the former, in the jumbled span of those minutes, would once again have been lost. Existing in the building was less like traveling in a time machine than like bumping around against the undigested contents of time’s stomach.

We were totally overwhelmed: despair had vanished in place of wonder. X didn’t mark 

 spot. We cleaned the President’s office and a month later it was stacked to the waist with boxes. I hung an evil eye from a vanity, and for good luck, the three of us took a Pegasus selfie inside its mirror. March arrived – April departed. Greeting incoming first-years at Visitas, we hauled out a pile of back issues to be cut up and collaged. None of the kids were very interested; nor were we. 21 South still deluged us with its mess.

We cleaned the banana room again; we did the dishes; we knew summer had arrived when the condensation fogging our windows after Friday night parties lingered until midday Saturday. This was our sign; we left.

September swooped in with hot breath. The house on 21 South Street, freshly repainted by our dedicated Publisher, Primo, was sparklier but smelled the same: like an old place filled with young people. Varya and Hugo were as stubbornly caring and careful as ever. That fall, the magazine began revealing its more intangible treasures: chairs half-broken to the curve of a nap; thick gray couches that just kept giving – cockroaches, crumbs, and ample room for a group of friends to yap until the wee morning.

All of us were driven to join the magazine from a love for arts and literature. But it would be a lie to say that we were not also allured by the aesthetics of the place: its warm wooden beams and old books, plastic vines and cheap wines, members who dressed for Halloween at nearly every party irregardless of season. The magazine’s history seemed a performance to be reenacted, over and over again, from late summer to the death of spring.

As autumn progressed into another snowless winter, these apparent treasures proved to be tricky ones. It was all too easy to become fixated on the performance of “artsy intelligentsia,” at the cost of actual artfulness or intelligence – to forget the collective duties we held to the publication and to one another. But whenever we became too absorbed in reenacting the magazine’s past, Ma Advo would guide us toward another treasure: an envelope of advice from an old executive board (

Get some motherfucking momentum going and do NOT lose it

). Crumpled photographs depicting un-aestheticized, unaffected joy. These missives from peers-long-grown nudged us forward, even as we looked to our history for guidance. They showed me what I loved most about the

: that we got to create art together – all while being dramatic, overdressed, and sweaty.

Mostly this meant killing a lot of cockroaches, having a lot of arguments about writing,  and mopping a lot of floors. Occasionally we drank wine and did stupid things. Always our President, Annika, took exquisite care to ensure that the

 had enough money, time, and random other resources (wax; fake blood; eye masks) to make our present possible and our future encouraging.

Autumn passed in another flurry of launch parties, concerts, cafes, and a newly-patented Pegasus event: “Beautification Days.” Hugo, Varya, and I had begun our term as Pegs with grand plans to fix everything that made us despair about the magazine: to clean shit out, open the building up, hasten the pandemic recovery that our former President Albert had begun and that Annika was pouring her heart into. But as despair turned to wonder and wonder into planning, the building constantly reminded us that we could do nothing alone – not even hunting for treasure.

Beautification Days (euphemistically named because we worried that “Cleaning Days” might put people off; optimistically named because we hoped that if we ever got enough cleaning done, we might eventually decorate) were our effort to bring all of Ma Advo’s children together in the restoration project. So we mopped and argued; we began naming our cockroaches and leaving them outside the university gym. October arrived and November soon followed. On the Beautification Day after fall semester initiations, cherubs began collaging old issues together for framing; others strung fairy lights across the ceiling.

We spent countless hours every semester putting the magazine together – but each board operated on their own, and writers on their lonesome. There was something magical about working together to physically transform the building we all shared. I loved being a Pegasus. I loved how generous 21 South was with its inhabitants, how my coziest sweaters spawned from its dustiest corners. And I loved how generous its inhabitants were with one another – lending clothes, ears, theremins, company. A year prior I had been reluctant to care for the magazine; now I seemed unable not to. I felt I could parse through the

 treasures forever, constantly surprised and occasionally jump-scared. My friends and I joked about having sleepovers in the building. Very rarely, when the floors were especially clean, I fantasized that we might all move in together.

 community has been enjoying the building we worked together to refurbish – and taking big steps to make our home a more inclusive space. We’ve conducted a comprehensive Diversity and Inclusion review of our process for admitting new members. Our newfound financial stability has enabled us to continue increasing the amount of support we offer to members through our recently-established financial aid program. We’ve hosted our typical parade of arts and literary events, from flea markets to art shows and essay readings. And yes – parties. Parties galore.

Sometimes all these awesome happenings make an even more awesome mess. Sometimes, I confess, I still experience an urge to de-jumble the place: to order and stack, optimize and chronologize. To spend my summer sorting our 150+ years of archives; to raise the money to buy new couches, retile the kitchen, furnish the bathroom. Varya and I will accomplish some of these things. But we’d be doing a disservice to our successors if we plumbed all the magazine’s secrets now, or oiled all its joints. Without their own strange treasure hunt through Ma Advo’s time-warp, how could they unearth their own love for 21 South?

I am always reminding myself to do as Annika wisely did: to leave the building better than she found it, and secret a few treasures away for future generations. So we gather tidbits for a Leap Day time capsule, collecting them in a used cake box; we tuck photographs deep in desk drawers; we present to you: 

This semester, the Features board asks you to dance. Roxy Hreb ‘26 meditates on pretense and performance as “Miss Savoir Faire”; while in “Afterlives,” Vanessa Hu ‘24 contemplates her ghostly presence on the dance floor. What does it mean to be here and not here, present but pretending? In respective interviews with literary critics Parul Sehgal and Adam Schatz, Tess Wayland ‘26 and Sazi Bongwe ‘26 discuss the art of political writing, and the vital ability to change one’s own mind. Does being a critic – and continually refining one’s critiques – mean being a consistent person with inconsistent ideas?

Where do ideas even come from, and when? Serena Jampel ‘25 and Katie Catulle ‘24 chat with author Lily King on shower thoughts and writing fiction about real people. The Fiction board sweeps us into the lives of the almost-real: Ellie Powell ‘25 cheekily reminds us that being a woman can be embarrassing; Ogechi Obi ‘26 unfolds the more sinister absurdities of female embodiment in the 21st century.

Frank Liu ‘26 designed the cover, which depicts “a cipher of ADVOCATE referencing Albrecht Durer’s monogram and medieval signatures, with some pseudo-Chinese elements.” I’m not sure what this means but I think that the cover is pretty cool, and that 

ciphering is a pretty good analogy for treasure hunting. As you dig through this issue, we hope that like Lily King, you “get ideas while reading” — a great description of art’s magical ability to reproduce itself in new forms.

I’d like to introduce you to Joann and Ingrid; to Mary and John; to a nameless narrator with many named friends; to the debutante’s Viennese waltz, and the social rhythms of bachata dancing in Seattle. Here is a bowl of crab fried rice. Here are sheafs of dreams and caducei. Here is an old woman, clutching a large baby doll, standing on a larger tortilla.

And here’s a secret – you only had to dig through my ciphers to find it: these pages will carry you across the globe; and the entire time that you are reading, you will be inside 

.  We offer to you the gift that Ma Advo offers to us: to always be traveling, and to always be at home. We gather art in our pages as we gather art in our spaces. Because art gives us wings and we may not be flying Pegasi, but we certainly look sexy in our costumes.

We love our magazine. We hope you love it, too.

Maren Wong

Maren Wong

Editor's Notes

Fall 2024 - Land

Editor's Note: Land Issue

Spring 2024

Editor's Note