Remembering

We’re embarking on our third year! Weeeee!!! Who knew we’d make it. A lot has happened for Triangle House in the last two years—continuing to publish, for one thing, but also an anthology, two AWPs, readings in Buffalo, Toronto, and Portland, and of course, incredible writing that I will not list here lest I become a favoritist. 

The world at large and literary world at small have also changed in the past two years—again in probably too many ways to list, but I think everyone gets the picture. With this issue, we wanted to honor not only what progress has been made within the literary community in the past two years, but also what has been lost. Any forward movement of time is inextricably tied to loss, and I felt this no more acutely than when Jade Sharma died in July. 

I met Jade several years ago, before I was involved with Triangle House.  I don’t know why Jade and I started talking at the Catapult event where we met, but our conversations flowed quickly and easily. When we saw each other, the things she told me felt like missives from a storied country: a writer crying about their girlfriend, also a writer, maybe cheating on her. Editors not to trust, parties that weren’t what they were made out to be. But we talked about much more than literary gossip. We talked about leaving boyfriends and rebuilding lives, about disappointment and love. 

Thinking about it now feels like time travel. The city below my feet is the same, I can trace the path we walked in Central Park. Some of the bars are gone, others are still here. I can still read Jade’s book, but she isn’t here. I am here, but I’m a different version of myself than the one that knew her. 

I regret losing touch with Jade, and I don’t know what to say about that other than the bare fact. 

She had a gift for describing things in modern life exactly as they are, yet in a way that they had never been described before. You get the sense from reading Problems that Jade intimately knew the rhythms of New York City, but you don’t know whether or not she loved them. We lost something important when we lost Jade; we lost an important perspective and a vital voice. But of course, that doesn’t really matter in comparison to losing her, the essence of her as a person and a soul. I don’t think that anyone will forget her or her novel. I don’t want to say it’s a pleasure to share an excerpt from Problems here, because it isn’t. It’s a tragedy, but it’s what felt right.

I hope that when you read this issue you get a sense of the comingling of loss and momentum that I’m talking about here, the loss of self that Niko Maragos describes in his essay on In the Dream House, the forward momentum of our third year long conversation with Wendy C. Ortiz. Brad Phillips revisits a mural from his past, and Sharanya’s poems reside, as poetry so often does, deep inside the present. 

The thing I love most about the dear present is that that’s where we form community. I’d like to give a special thank you to Ben Fama, editor of Wonder Press, for art directing this issue. The artist is Robin Treadwell, co-owner of Codex Books. It always feels special when we’re able to work with writers and artists who foster literary community to create these issues. Thanks, Ben and Robin.

We have a big year ahead of us (more news to come,) but now as I lie in my bed in my freezing apartment, I hope to always remember what we lost. It’s no good to dwell forever in the past, but it’s no better to forget it, and literature gives us the best way of remembering that we have. 

— Becca