Future Histories

In 2017, me and Swalsh and some other friends like Fiona, Nicole and Jeremy decided to start a publication. There had been a Tufts lit mag before, but it had succumbed to attrition the previous year, and it seemed obvious that sooner or later somebody would have to start a new one. Since we were all involved with literary-ish scenes we figured: why not us?

On encouragement from friends, Sarah and I deputized ourselves co-editors-in-chief. We made flyers and for a general interest meeting and word got out quick. There were maybe thirty people at the first general interest meeting, who I can only assume were enthralled and delighted by our lightning-in-a-bottle powerpoint presentation.

We got a stunning number of applications for the first executive board, and an even more stunning number of submissions for our pilot Issue 0.

The reviewers reviewed, designers designed, and in December of 2017—six weeks after our first meeting—we went to press. And by that I mean we printed a bunch of copies on letter paper in Tisch Library, hand-stapled them together, and went to my basement to get wine-drunk and read poetry.

It was a rush-job but it was done.

But before the ink had dried, my co-founder and I were off to Europe for our semesters abroad—I in Spain and she in France. It was a wonderful stress-test: could this babe of a club survive without our constant fiddling, wrangling, harping, and etc?

It could. And it survived our return for senior year, and our departure again, and it survived COVID disruptions, and it's still going strong today.

I learned a lot from my time with FH—most of all, how to build something that didn't need me.