Additional Note
Because I am retiring after this semester, this is my last issue as the Gandy Dancer faculty advisor. How I will miss working alongside Production Editor Allison Brown and the student editors each semester! This has been enriching and fun, and I’m grateful for the relationships—near and far—that grew from this work. When we started Gandy, I didn’t completely understand that a literary journal creates a community and a hub for that community. We creatives need community in a world that prefers facts and figures and the bottom line to creative expression. Much works against the making of art—our fears about global instability and environmental collapse, not to mention the mushroom cloud of AI—so community feels especially essential now.
Margaret Anderson, the founder of The Little Review, which ran from 1914 to 1929, said, “If I had a magazine I could spend my time filling it with the best conversations the world has to offer.” For the past fourteen years, I have loved the conversation here at Gandy. Many thanks to all the former editors, writers, artists, and their professors across the SUNY system for making that conversation so compelling. If you are new to the journal, I hope you’ll join in, add your voice to the vibrant mix.
To commemorate my final issue Allison suggested a larger Postscript section, featuring a collection of alumni writers, though we usually publish just one in each issue. We eventually landed on inviting former Gandy editors to submit work and encouraged them to address the theme of endings and beginnings, loosely interpreted. I’m delighted that so many former editors submitted work. It was a pleasure to read their words again—and I know you will enjoy these poems, essays, and stories, too. You will find here all manner of riches: deep understanding of human nature, curiosity about the past and a desire to understand the ways it lives on. In these writers’ love and knowledge of the natural world, there is hope for our imperiled planet. The best conversations. In total, there are twenty pieces in our Postscript folio. In order not to overwhelm the regular contributions, we publish most online exclusively.
I leave the journal in the good hands of Professors Emrys Donaldson and Lytton Smith. I know Gandy will flourish in their care. Much gratitude to the English department, Milne Library, the Office of Sponsored Research, the Parry family, and the college. This venture couldn’t have happened without your support.
Despite the name of our journal coming from old railroad slang, we decided early on in Gandy Dancer’s history that we shouldn’t lean too hard on railroad language. We didn’t want to be “that train journal,” as one former editor put it. We decided we would not talk about “the journey” or close a note to the readers with the phrase “All aboard!” So, I hope I can be forgiven for saying this at the end of my tenure: What an amazing ride!
–RH