By Meg Gladieux and Mira Sydow | Photos by Julian Valgora
Dearest Reader,
A question we’ve gotten a lot since announcing the launch of this magazine: What is The Woodlands?
In a few words: serene, Austenian, green, alive, dead, real, not-at-all real, and fucking nuts.
What we knew when we started: (1) our magazine would be a space where reported journalism and creative writing didn’t have to be mutually exclusive, (2) writing and designing is hard work and should be paid—all writers and designers for this issue received compensation for their work, (3) we are committed to community care, treating our sources with the love that is woven into the fabric of our stories, not just as quotes that paper our work.
What we didn’t know: starting a magazine is hard as hell.
It began with The Green Couch, a literary journalism magazine run out of the Kelly Writers House in the early 2000s that stopped running in the early 2010s. Separately, we fell in love with the eponymous green couch nestled in an alcove framed by a window spilling over with plants, a wooden tea-shelf, and cushy armchairs in the living room. The Green Couch magazine wasn’t ours to revive, but perhaps in its ashes, we could recreate something new.
The Woodlands Magazine rose from the hard-packed ground of The Woodlands Cemetery, a historically-steeped refuge from the corporate bustle of Penn life. It rose from ten bodies huddled in a circle on the steps of Hamilton Mansion, talking about death; from three girls flailing mallets through a homemade croquet game, dressed (sort of) like Jane Austen characters; from first date walks and well-loved books and earth-shaking cries. This magazine is a textual version of our experiences: a haven for breakthroughs and respite, a chronicle of stories that are specific to place, but also true to life.
Our inaugural issue is a collection of narrative and lyrical stories that urgently need to be told, even if they aren’t breaking news. Among them, tales of Penn After Midnight, a collection of vignettes of campus under the cover of darkness beyond frat parties and Wawa at 2 a.m.; reporting on the ghosts that besiege Locust Walk and the people they haunt; poetry from the People’s Townhomes. These pages are filled with smells, poetry, tattoos, music, dorm rooms, basements, graveyards, homes beloved and destroyed, places that have faded into memory, places that ask not to be seen, from the inside out, from the outside in.
It wouldn’t be an inaugural editors’ letter without a bouquet of thank yous. Firstly, to the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation for funding our dream and allowing us to compensate our writers and designers. Thank you to the Kelly Writers House for being our home, particularly Jessica Lowenthal, for following us from the earliest stages of this project and for remaining enthusiastic every step of the way. Thank you to our many writing professors at Penn, particularly Jay Kirk, for his ethos of experimental nonfiction which inspired our style of journalism. Our friends and family, who listened to us explain this magazine’s many iterations and met us with nothing but love. And of course, all of our written contributors, Alan, Armie, Deb, Gigi, Norah, Rowana, we are so happy you trusted us with your work, and our designers, Joanna and Tyler, for bringing these pieces to life.
We have crossed the gates into The Woodlands Cemetery many times; cross with us now the threshold to The Woodlands Magazine.
Love,
Mira + Meg
The Woodlands 