Dear readers,
There are a lot of ways to say goodbye. The poets have tried. Louise Bogan calls it “leave-taking.” Emily Brontë reminds us to “follow out the happiest story.” Perhaps Yvor Winters puts it best: “This is the terminal, the break.” Here we are, at the terminal of our tenure, and there’s not much else to do but wave.
This issue holds a lot of goodbyes. In our cover story, Meg Buzbee explores the pain of saying goodbye to a quiet neighborhood taken over by airport turbulence. Chloe Nguyen explores Connecticut’s new ethnic studies elective and helps us bid farewell to the history curriculum of the past. We have other, smaller goodbyes—odes to the farmland that borders our city campus, farewells to staying quiet in spoken word poetry. A goodbye to home and all of its food, to the expenses of the year, to churches and summer and loved ones.
In our last issue as a managing board, we felt these farewells in everything we did: our last pitch meeting, our last production weekend, our last design proofing all-nighter. Our farewell isn’t unique. When we started our tenure as a board, we read over letters of advice from boards before ours and combed through their challenges. This February, we wrote our own letters. They are also a form of farewell, one that means we will be there for you.
We’re trying to think of this not as a goodbye but as a see you later. We can’t wait to see what our next board does, and the next one, and the next. This journal is as good as our lineage. We’ll be waiting when the plane lands.
With TNJ love always,
Abbey, Jabez, Paola, & Kylie