Editors’ Note (Issue 2)
Welcome to Issue 2 of Deerfield, which contains projects created by students in Boston University Writing Program courses during 2023 and selected by an Editorial Committee of faculty and students.
Many of the contributions to this issue explore the relationship between language, justice, and storytelling. To what extent might language intentionally or unintentionally obscure how we remember the past, understand the present, or anticipate the future? What does it mean to use language ethically, and how can language be solicited as a vehicle for liberation and truth?
Ethan Cappelleri questions the value of purportedly “objective” journalism, suggesting a provocative distinction between objectivity and truth. Stella Lavallee explores the concept of environmental and economic injustice by considering its effects on her hometown of Chelsea, Massachusetts, while Trinity Olander argues that large businesses and factory farms use lobbying and media manipulation to turn the public eye away from their unethical practices.
This tension between the objective and subjective continues in Mrinalee Reddy’s piece, but on a more personal and intimate scale: that of self-portraiture and serialized photography. The link between the personal and the political arises again as Karishma Sivakumar encourages us to think more critically about the metaphors that often shape how we understand the world, putting Susan Sontag’s observation about the “war metaphors” used to describe those living with cancer in conversation with Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals.
Examining media coverage of the 2011 tsunami in Japan, Roshan Sivaraman questions why we have a tendency to imagine the destruction from such events as unavoidable, suggesting that such a framing too quickly relinquishes society from the burden of anticipating and preventing such tragedies in the future. And for those who might imagine big data and the computer age as a solution to limitations of subjectivity, Emma Stone exposes how artificial intelligence, too, often is trained on biased datasets, lacks transparency, and may be employed in ways that cause more harm than good. All of these essays demonstrate the urgent need to retain that which makes us human, and Brielle Telfair looks toward our own Boston MFA to think about the way art can nurture and heal the human within.
The last few years have witnessed a rapid expansion in alternative genres, digital and multimodal forms, and creative writing work in Writing Program classes. We are delighted to devote an entire section of this issue to a small sampling of this new diversity in genre and form. Zaiyue Gui’s “The Sunbonnet” is a short story set in China in the midst of World War 2, while Layla Thu Nguyen’s “ When the Lotus Speaks,” is a collection of intensely beautiful poems about intimacy, connection, language, and tenderness, inspired by Vietnamese language and cultural history. Rae Ruane and Jiayi Zhang each contribute graphic memoirs that reveal the great irony of memoir as a form: in writing about the uniqueness of one’s own experiences, their personal testimonies attend to universal themes of vulnerability, strength, growing up, and living with full recognition of the frailty and resilience of the human body.
Because communication is not always something that happens in writing alone, our issue concludes with Tiffany Liu’s video essay and Alyssa Bauman and Kamya Parekh’s podcast episode, both of which return to the theme of language, truth, and justice. Liu explores China’s struggle-to-success approach in climate change, while Bauman and Parekh engage in a smart (and often humorous) critical discussion of “The Little Mermaid” retellings, a fishy tale (tail?) to launch us into summer.
The warm, verdant promise of summer is so well captured in our cover image by Iris Ren. The figure relaxes in the arms of the arboreal landscape, a book over their face. Are they reading, or are they asleep? Perhaps a little of both, not a bad combination at all.