Editor’s Note

In normal times, under normal conditions, I would open this Editor’s Note with the customary “Welcome to the inaugural issue of BreakBread Magazine, a journal for young creatives under the age of 25.”

In normal times, under normal conditions, this Editor’s Note would continue with a shout out to my amazing team who helped bring this dream to (digital) life. It would include a humorous retelling of the journey of starting a literary magazine for young people in the middle of a global pandemic. It would encourage readers to donate and give feedback and pass this along to other readers hungry for mighty new voices. In normal times, under normal circumstances, that would have been the first Editor’s Note, leading you, dear reader, to think that BreakBread Magazine was a normal magazine.

But these aren’t normal times. 

Nor are these normal circumstances.

Thus, this is not a normal magazine. 

As I write this opening to this issue, the United States has been undergoing a constant deluge of challenges that have threatened to erode its very roots, threatened to drown us all. Some challenges have been with us awhile: police brutality, climate change, voter suppression. Some challenges are relatively new for some: COVID-19 pandemic, food and employment insecurities. And some challenges shook even the most stoic amongst us: the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. 

Throughout all of these not-so-normal times and not-so-normal circumstances, the old people fought and fussed, rallied and ridiculed, passed judgement and laid blame. Simply put, we rehashed the rehash. The young people? What have they done? What did they do? They gave fresh voice to fresh perspectives. They redesigned their anger to light the path. They showed us, as Laura Ingman did in “Visiting The Doll Hospital,” that “Heaven is a place downtown two blocks from the Bay.” They drew images, as Afua Bonaa does with the piece “The Littlest One,” that showed us our screams are holy, that our screams turn to haloes, turn us to statues standing for our own Liberty and Justice for All. With Lex Chilson’s “I Miss The Lagoon and Her Lullabies,” they lead us back to personal connections with lines such as “Listen to her underwater memory/ bathe us in remedies and eucalyptus/Here, we are at home.” While we were occupied with reconstructing ages-old narratives with the same static language, the same dried-up pens, the same worn and torn paper, the young creatives were giving voice to what really matters: what it means to be afraid to stand your ground but standing it anyway; how much loving someone can leave you without love; that a sly smile can uncurl the tightest fist; that the most important sound in any reality, alternate or otherwise, is the sound of a young voice speaking The Truth. 

Give a young person a challenge. Get art in return. That is what we are here to celebrate. 

“There are years that ask questions,” Zora Neale Hurston wrote in Their Eyes Are Watching God, “and some years answer.” When I listen to the voices of the young creatives, I can hear the promise in Hurston’s words. THAT, dear reader, is the heart, soul, and mission of BreakBread Magazine. May the words and works of the young artists here help us to leave the questions behind and imagine the answers ahead. 

Welcome to the first of many issues...

W. David Hall, Editor-in-Chief

January 24, 2021
Ventura, CA