Letter from the Editor - 1st Edition
Welcome to the first edition of Drawstring Magazine. We are all very excited to share this project with you and see how it unfolds over the coming months. Thank you to all of the contributors for this edition, and thank you to our audience, whoever you may be. We appreciate your eyes and minds. And if you find our efforts and content worthy, please consider leaving us a two dollar tip! All funds will be distributed amongst the contributors to the current edition.
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Drawstring Magazine is here because writing feels like something we can do right now.
Words are free. You can put them in an infinite number of combinations to entertain yourself. You can play with words. You can sculpt them like clay or carve away at them like marble. They are ever present in our heads, on our screens, and on our tongues. Words feel comforting right now, and recession proof.
I have a tendency to deconstruct objects. I once removed every seed from a strawberry with tweezers, just to see what that would feel like. I try to reduce things to their core, including feelings and experiences, especially traumatic ones. The pandemic and subsequent isolation needs to be explained to me daily. At first I felt incapable of creating anything, I just consumed voraciously. I’m hungry for analysis from experts, as well as the raw emotional experiences coming from my 20 year old students. I understand through obsession, through analysis, and through deconstruction.
At some point I started to write. Writing, while vacillating through the chaotic phases of early isolation, just popped up in front of me. The first thing I wrote to share publicly initially materialized as a six minute audio note that I recorded right after waking up. It didn’t even need much polishing. Words just come like that sometimes. It can feel more like through you than in you.
Anyone who knows me is aware that I need to talk a problem to death before I can let it go. So I assembled some friends to put free words down on un-free computers and tell each other about our lives, our thoughts, and our experiences, right now. This is officially a post-Corona pandemic publication. That does not mean that any specific amount of the content will be related to current events, but rather that it is born out of the Covid-19 Pandemic and everyone and everything has now changed. We are post-Corona, we are Drawstring Magazine.
Jessica Pierotti, Founder & Editor
P.S. The goal is for this publication to be bi-monthly with a full edition released each time rather than a rolling feed of content. That means the next edition is already in production (yikes!). I would love to read pitches or submissions, but if you are writing time sensitive commentary, or would just really like to be considered for the next edition, please get in touch ASAP. And don’t forget to submit relationship and sex questions to Jeanne for the Pandemic Love column!