PREFACE BY: Prof. Dan Ryan
ABOUT THE DESIGN
"City Tech LGBTQAI+ Poster," by Arnie Pelaez
My club advisor for City Tech Pride Club was the first to tell me about the competition for the LGBTQIA+ poster, and encouraged me to try out for it. I myself am a part of the community and have always enjoyed creating art, designing characters, and writing LGBTQ storylines along with them.
It is a struggle for many to be out and feel accepted. No one should have to live in silence with their identity or feel afraid to. Acceptance is what builds trust in a community. So I chose to illustrate two of my college characters who are queer to relate to other students on campus.
Dear City Tech students,
This is the part where I’m supposed to talk up our accomplishments this year.
I could tell you that this year, we published 23 exemplary poems, stories, and essays by City Tech students on topics as varied as academic burnout, doomed romance, hyper-competitive organic chemistry students, Little Red Riding Hood, gothic revenge, and Frida Kahlo.
I could tell you that we’ve investing in our on-campus presence. That we’ve partnered with City Tech’s library on a permanent City Tech Writer physical display, as well as a rotating digital display of student work, starting this fall. That we now host on-campus open mics and submission workshops and revising sessions so that you have the guidance you need to publish your words.
I could tell you that we have a new website, on which you can search for student work by author and by genre; that, after many, many hour of scanning, deleting, consolidating, and uploading this summer, we will have all 21 volumes of City Tech Writer accessible on this website, with literally hundreds of pieces created by generations of City Tech students available so that you, our campus community, and the wide world to engage with your words.
Finally, I could tell you that we’ve launched new social media outreach to get your words out into the world, a Youtube channel featuring your fellow students reading their published work, and an Instagram featuring your fellow students’ photography/graphic design/writing that already has 100 followers. (I know that’s not alot, but we only launched it this spring. And also, chill, we’re a college literary magazine, we’re not Kylie.)
But so what?
Why does any of that matter?
They’re just words.
Well, I’ll ask you a question in return:
What the heck is going on with you and your parents?
I mean it. The students we published this year are obsessed with parents (Kadiata Kaba writes about seeing her mother with new eyes, Edith Zhao writes about being trapped with her mother, Taro J. Suzuki writes about losing his mother) and children (Zhi Re Wu‘s narrator forgets his own children, and Shenna T. Williams writes about not wanting children at all).
Parental advice features prominently: Xiuying He writes about realizing that the advice her parents gave her was wrong, while Myo Kyaw finally sees the wisdom in his mother’s words.
Parental disappointment is also a running theme: Pierre Ralph Wesh‘s protagonist breaks his mother’s heart, while Rafiul Bari’s protagonist breaks his father’s heart, then overcomes brutal odds to earn back his respect; getting slightly more macro, Neri Deo is deeply disappointed by his (colonial) literary forebears, and Attina Zhao is deeply disappointed by that most disappointing mother of us all, JK Rowling.
Occasionally, parents are heroic: Alua Alchinbayeva’s folks race through the city to find her missing pet; Sabrina Cruz teaches her son to read; and in Jacqua Sea’s story, a mother’s undying love for her son summons a miracle.
Often, though, lineage, from parent to child to grandchild, comes with pain, as in Rajah Ferdinand‘s “Hot Seat”; things get even darker in Destiny Akinode‘s “First Bite,” in which the narrator eats his father, then his child.
I know. I contemplated calling this volume of City Tech Writer “Daddy Issues.”
But I don’t think it’s as simple as that.
You are college students. You enter our halls just as you are starting to question the world your parents have handed you; four years later, you leave our campus ready, in theory, to prepare this world for your own children.
We, your professors, are not your parents. (Please remember that next week during finals, when you descend on our office hours with pleas for grace and extra credit.) Our job is to arm you with the knowledge and skills to navigate this world.
But we are also custodians of this world you are being handed.
And I don’t know if you’ve done a vibe check out there. But … there is room for improvement.
So we can feel you now, looking at us, asking, “What did you do? What did you do, when you were our age, living each day with the threat of economic collapse, war, shootings, epidemics, pandemics and so many social movements with still, somehow, so much work left to be done?”
And you’re going to hate this answer.
We turned to great writers.
We turned to great leaders who put their thoughts into words, and their words into action; leaders whose words inspired us to act as well.
And now, we turn to you.
You are the future of our city, our country, our planet, our species. We look to you to becomes leaders who have the vision to imagine entirely new possibilities for our industries, our politics, our laws, and our schools–and the skills to articulate that vision in a way that moves people to action. We look to you to think and write and speak our future into existence.
I get that that seems like a tall order.
But today, we will look to Taro, who writes about his deceased mother, who he can still feel cheering him on as he pursues his dreams; to Shenna, who realizes that the terror she feels about bringing black daughters into the world is the the same fear her mother had, but she chose to have her anyway; to Pierre and Neri and Attina, who have the courage to question their elders’ “conventional wisdom”; to Destiny, whose hero “seeks a life beyond” the limits their parents have imagined for them; to Edith and Zhi and Alua and Kadiata and Myo and Jacqua and Rajah and Meribet and Rosamaria and and Brenda and Prof. Gertzog’s entire class, who all see the profound beauty in our world; to Jacqua and Rafiul and Myo and Xiuying and Kimberly and Mohammed and Sabrina, who see new possibilities for it. Finally, we turn to Kevin, whose poem is a benediction for those who have come before us, but especially those yet to come. He writes, “To the next generation / our pioneers in a world of doubt / lead us in this beautiful, wicked world.”
Today, we will look to City Tech’s writers.
And your task will feel less impossible.
And so, to end this, I’ll of course thank the many City Tech administrators, whose ongoing investment in City Tech Writer is an investment in your words; I’ll thank the extraordinary professors who encouraged you to submit your work because they believe in your words; and I’ll thank our former editors, to whom I am forever indebted, for creating this journal that brings your words out into the world.
But most of all, I will thank you.
Thank you, the students of City Tech, for your words.
Because they remind us that there is still hope, and then some.
They remind us that our future is in good hands.
With gratitude,
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