InkCollective is a quarterly literary journal that knits together disparate voices on a central theme. It’s on hiatus.
I had planned to tell you all about the places I have slept over the years—hand-me-down bunk beds, the back seats of cars, a damp pile of leaves under a girl’s bedroom window—and end the whole thing with the night I slept on the hospital bed my mother would later die on. In fact, I did write about it, several times, about the realization when I awoke that soon she wouldn’t be able to sit up in her arm chair and we would have to move her to the bed, and then, once we settled her down on that mattress, she would never go anywhere else until the morticians came and took her away to be embalmed. I wrote about the days I spent in that house, the house I had grown up in, sitting in the kitchen laughing with visitors, while my mother slumped, unconcious, on that mattress a half-dozen yards away. I wrote about the day we arrived at the house after her funeral, and although the bed had been removed from the living room, I saw the indentations of its wheels on the rug. I wrote about the impact that places have on us, not just as places where we lie our heads at night, or locations for the drama we all experience as significant, but as integral spaces that are as much a part of us as our own skin.
The reason I am not sharing those other drafts is that this is the last issue of InkCollective for quite some time, and although we set out in issue (Four) to talk about Place, I find myself now talking about endings. The time and the money have run out, for now, and we’re going to put the whole project on the shelf. We’ve had a great time, reading the entries that have been submitted, hundreds of which were not even accepted into the pages that you now hold. We at InkCollective want to express our thanks for all of your support over the past year, and we hope to come to you refreshed, invigorated, and renewed after a much-needed hiatus.
Saying goodbye is bittersweet, so we did it the only way we know how—with great essays, stories, and comics from some of the most talented up and comers in the business. Come explore Place with essays by Jessica Belt and Drake Hills; fiction by Jackson Bliss, Michael Overa, and Tom Bruno; the last week of Robert Kaufman’s diary for his Blockology project; poetry by Kristine Ong-Muslim and Matthew Lubin; comics by Robert J. Grug III, Jessica McLeod, Box Brown, and Sarah Morean; and illustrations by l.k.j. Gavs and Jessica McLeod, wrapped in a gorgeous cover by Lisa Ward.
Places themselves can signal endings to us. Almost a year after my mother died, I again visited my childhood home and walked through the living room where her hospital bed had stood. It was long gone, as were the indentations in the rug, both replaced by a pile of paperwork my father had left on an ottoman. But I knew then, even without the bed, that I couldn’t bear to be in that place. The problem had never been the bed, but the room, the space, the place where I used to dump out my blocks and set up my train sets had become, in my memory, the place where cancer finally killed my mother. I apologized to my father, turned, and never came back.
