Audrey Lai, Arts & Culture Editor
I‘VE NOTICED that whenever I read fiction, the settings of every story become a place I’ve been in my own life in my mind’s eye, even if I don’t recognize them right away. The New England suburb of East Gladness from Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness becomes my Midwestern hometown. The convenience store of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman becomes my local 7/11. The halls of Hampden College from Donna Tartt’s The Secret History becomes Trinity College. Even if the detailed descriptions of each place are contradictory to what I imagine in my head, the image I already have remains triumphant, the author’s words be damned. Sorry to all my fellow Creative Writing minors out there.
What I’m trying to say is that our surroundings—whether it be our local communities, our natural environment, or the larger political landscape—fundamentally shape who we are as artists and audiences, as writers and reviewers. Engaging in art, even in the most detached way, requires you to bring forth all of who you are and where you come from. It is impossible to divorce ourselves from how we consume and create.
Whenever I revisit a text I always get a doubly nostalgic sense of both the person I was when I first encountered it and where I was. The text is not only the author’s story but also my own memory vessel. I read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway for the first time in my senior year of high school and became attached to Clarissa’s reminiscences of her summer at Bourton. Her life afterward is framed and interpreted through the memories of that formative time of her youth. Famously, the first page of the novel opens with a moment in which she seems to travel back to the past:
“What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.”
I read Mrs. Dalloway again in my first year of university, and not only were my annotations from high school physically there, but also my first impressions of the story and my past understandings of home and my sense of place. And each reread forward, the story becomes imbued with new meaning. Our stories are all, in some ways, told through memories of our own Bourtons.
The Arts & Culture Section is a place where we investigate the arts as a collective experience of constant creation and re-creation of meaning. It is our goal as journalists to consider and re-consider whose touch has molded our culture and the impact of our own hands while we try our best to grasp onto it. As your new Arts editor, I hope the articles we publish this volume bring attention to the forces that have shaped the culture but also the forces that have shaped us as writers—after all, our entrance into the conversation of culture, no matter how small, means we have also become part of it.
Sincerely,
Audrey Lai (she/her)
2025-2026 Arts Editor
