Editor-In-Chief Letter

Some people create photo albums of their most memorable experiences over time. To collect the vibes of each individual period of my life, I use songs as the “photos” that would appear in photo albums. The photo album containing all my individual pictures would instead be my Spotify playlists, developed over the course of many years.

Whenever I want to be transported back into time, I know I can hit shuffle on my main Spotify playlists. I have songs related to my first college visits during Covid. I have songs tied to the first few days spent on Illinois State University’s campus as a freshman. I have songs that characterize the first chapter of discovering I love to run. And I have songs related to some of the most common human experiences of emotion, for good and for bad. All I have to do is close my eyes, listen, and envision the memories enraptured within the melodies and lyrics.

But you wouldn’t be able to understand what those songs specifically relate to. To you, they are just songs accumulated across a five-year period. The lyrics paint their own story, without me having to explain much, but my life is still interlaced in ways that are inexpressible, while still being somewhat understood by a wider audience.

As you review this issue of Euphemism, as well as other issues of the past, the story you are perceiving is a secondary version to how the author experienced those artful moments. The author wants to give you a glance into their lives and illuminate a snippet—a picture—within the photo album of their life.

These submissions are gifts to our ongoing story as Euphemism, the glue holding our issues together, as I pass the torch to our next Editor-in-Chief. Euphemism will always reflect the times, the turmoil, and the treasure of the present era.

It is impossible to evade changes within our environment, nor should it be refused, and so we go on, creating art along the way, with words, sounds, and visuals as our outlets of emotion. And one day, these outlets will become the historical primary sources for truth, showing another side to a story that would otherwise be misunderstood and lost with the souls that fall victim to time’s ungraceful grasp.

Write it down, record the sounds, piece together a visual masterpiece. Whatever must be done to represent a story that should not die or be silenced under the control of time, do it. Euphemism will be here to collect those moments. Euphemism will be an all-encasing, ever-changing scrapbook for the stories of authors who represent the world around us.

Kati Fuchs

Euphemism’s Editor-in-Chief