Editor's Note: Fall 2017

L: Four times a year, our printer deposits a mountain of



boxes in our front hall. We pull off the tape to get our hands



on the new issues, our glossy seasonal produce. Upstairs the



magazines are variously pored over, flipped through, tossed



on the ground, stacked on the tables, organized



chronologically one day and repurposed as coasters the



next. Every other cover bears a sticky purple ring of dried



wine like a bruise. Some of the boxes don’t get opened.



These migrate into a particular closet, and then, after a



decade, to a second closet across the hall, and then, at



twenty years of age, to the sad cement nook beneath the



basement stairs. Down there, dust and water form a paste



that glues the issues’ pages together. The ones that survive



stick around for a while: the rough paper of the early



Advocate’s pamphlets cohabitates in our bookshelves with



the smooth prismatic matte of the past decade. Our first



fifty volumes have retired to bound tomes. When we poke



through copies from the 90s, we imagine our predecessors



lounging around these very couches while we––the future



so-called collegiate literati––were napping in our baby



strollers. This fall, we’ve resurrected the glossy vibes of the



70s Advocate. Paper: slick. Spine: stapled. Content? Fresh.



L: A naturalization of the eerie, or exposing of the sinister?



A fall from grace, or a courageous leap? Was it said, or was



it embodied? Cyclical motion, or an arrest of momentum?



New England autumn points ambiguously to mortality and



vigor in the face of it, toward the moral and the sensorial,



forward and backwards. In this issue, the light and dark



consider their changing relationship. The retrospective



is constructed, and the new smiles back uncannily. And



featured contributors Sarah Nicholson and Jorge Olivera



Castillo publish work, for which we are extremely grateful.