by Nell Beck and Sam Schuman | Editors Desk | Fall 2020
Welcome to the 30th issue of Wilder Voice.
When we began planning this issue in June, we faced far more unknowns than knowns. Oberlin had yet to announce its three-semester schedule for the academic year, and staff turnover left us with a Wilder Voice crew of just three, to say nothing of the broader world-historic events occuring around us. We knew that our work would continue, but the form that that traditionally print-forward work would take was far from assured.
We decided to embrace these disruptions by looking backwards to Wilder Voice’s institutional past as we imagined how the magazine would operate differently this year. We set to work on a brand-new website to accommodate Oberlin’s mandated shift to online publication, and we began to reach out to former Wilder Voice editors to get a sense of what the magazine has meant to Oberlin’s community of writers and readers throughout its history. In September, we celebrated the launch of wildervoicemag.com. And with the new site, we began a new web-exclusive interview series, “Institutional Memory,” which explores the magazine’s past through conversations with former staff members.
We also modified our editorial process to give every piece we publish an even greater level of attention and care, and updated our style guide to make it more inclusive and up to date—adding in obligatory rules for pandemic-related terms like “Zooming,” for instance. This Editors’ Letter is itself a new addition to the magazine, a chance for us to tell you directly why we’re excited about this semester’s iteration of Wilder Voice.
All of these changes have been made so that we might better pursue Wilder Voice’s primary goal: providing Oberlin students with a space for true stories. And this issue marks some of the magazine’s most intimate pieces yet: Fiona Warnick dives deep into her personal relationship with shopping malls and the gender politics they imply (“Me, The Mall, And I”); Mary Brody discusses living in a house with three visual artists and speaks with her roommates about their work (“Visual Processes”); and Aniella Day shares a moving account of the death of her brother, who would have graduated from Oberlin this spring (“AIDEN”).
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It feels trite, at this point, to invoke the coronavirus pandemic in a note of this kind, but it feels equally dishonest to ignore it. It’s simply a fact of Oberlin life, one we tacitly acknowledged every day this fall as we attended masked meetings in large rooms and did our level best to stay present and focused over Zoom calls. None of the works you’ll find in this issue take COVID-19 as their direct subject, but none of them elide it, either. They remind us that although the pandemic remains foundational to our daily lives, the way that it is experienced is far from monolithic.
Now, as always, stories are unfolding, and they deserve to be shared. As the coronavirus has narrowed public life considerably, those stories have only become more personal. To say that they are stronger for it would be to impose a specious silver lining on a global tragedy which has, at press time, killed over 1.5 million people—many of them already marginalized. But, in the midst of the bizarre social circumstance we are enduring, telling stories remains as meaningful as ever.
So welcome to the 30th issue of Wilder Voice. We hope that the time you spend here will be as rewarding for you as it has been for us.
—Nell Beck and Sam Schuman
Editors-in-Chief, Wilder Voice
Wilder Voice Magazine 