Letter from Editor
Olivia Belluck
Issue Four June 11, 2021
My generation will always remember this time as the year of Zoom University. A year wrought with copious emails to account for our lack of in-person communication, the desperate need to purchase blue light glasses, and our determination to make everything as normal as possible. And with a minimum of three hours a day of straight Zoom schooling, the screen fatigue was real and excruciating. But fourteen Colorado College students – myself included – with a passion for writing and publishing spent an additional four hours every month in our editor-in-chief Professor Natanya Pulley’s virtual Literary Publishing Adjunct in order to learn more about the complexities of the publishing industry and our role in it. Our work in this course included class visits from editors, publishers, and authors who offered vital and personal insights that we will carry with us as we continue to create. Somehow, we read through all 220 submissions and somehow, we were able to choose just 25 to feature in the fourth issue of Hairstreak Butterfly Review. Everything you will read here is a product of the Colorado College community’s labor of love and patience with this new reality. Our team has worked from all different corners of the world, to bring you voices from all different corners of the world.
We underwent a heavy site redesign, updating our layout and incorporating unique visuals to create our uniquely whimsical aesthetic. One of the many changes you will see in our new HBR website is the creation of a new genre – the Instar genre – named for the developmental phase between two stages of butterfly transformation. Which seems rather apt, seeing as we have all been forced into a new, developmental phase that none of us were prepared for. Like caterpillars in a cocoon, we found ourselves cocooned and were faced with the need to metamorphosize and remake. As a magazine, we were also reshaping ourselves.
Additionally, the journal took on myself and Sydney Story as assistant managing editors. As two aspiring writers, the opportunity to work with and elevate our emerging authors for this issue was invaluable to both Sydney and me. For me personally, this job came at a time of immense flux and insecurity. I was unsure of my future as a writer, and I was frustrated at the universe’s unwillingness to reinforce my dream, but this work has taught me just how much time and consideration goes into every decision. Every word, each layout, it all comes under scrutiny. But knowing all this has only inspired me further and has added a new motivation to my writing.
And the reach of Colorado College network extends beyond our assistants, volunteers, and editors. We are welcoming one of our contributors, Brandon Shimoda, to the Colorado College faculty next semester as an assistant professor in English. And we are grateful to feature the work of Dot Devota – who will be a Block Visitor in Colorado College’s Advanced Poetry Workshop. Included in this issue is also alumnus and award-winning poet Jennifer Tseng’s piece “百感交集,” focusing on the importance of family and connectedness during times when we must be physically apart.
This will be forever known as a time of artificial connectivity, of loss not just of loved ones but of the time and the future we were promised. So perhaps subconsciously and certainly symbolically of our collective state of mourning, many of the pieces you will read here focus on the losses of life. The adulthood we expected now lost to being back home with our parents; the jobs and promises of an exciting new future; the loved ones we lost to sickness and distance. But we as people have the unique ability to take that pain, that sadness, that anger, and channel it into something beautiful. And as we were all trapped inside and with ourselves, we learned the importance of interrelatedness, of treasuring the people and places that left a mark so deep that it became a part of us. We at HBR hope that this magazine, and all the little pieces of our authors that it holds, will leave a new mark that you will take with you, as we all begin to emerge from our quarantine cocoons.
~~Olivia Belluck, Asst. Managing Editor of Hairstreak Butterfly Review
Olivia Belluck is a student at Colorado College, majoring in Film and Media Studies and minoring in Psychoanalysis. Hailing from New York, she was raised on copious amounts of fantasy novels and science-fiction movies. She hopes to spend her life writing novels and screenplays, including her own fantasy series. Her short stories have been featured in Leviathan Magazine, most recently in their March 2021 issue. Her films have been featured in numerous film festivals including the Independent Short Awards, and she is currently developing a documentary on wolf conservation in the American west.