Welcome to Helicon’s Winter Quarter Issue 2025!
Winter in Evanston (and some of Fall, and let’s face it, most of Spring) can be a challenge; I hope that this issue, while arriving at the tail end of the season, provides a bright spot amid the dreary days. As usual, we have a selection of poetry, prose, and art from Northwestern undergraduate students. These pieces span topics and themes far beyond the season, and we’re so excited to share them with you. We have works about family, about time in the sun, and about community and culture, and all of the emotions and feelings that come with them.
In times of deprivation, or of gloomy weather, art is what keeps us hopeful. In the stories in this issue, characters demonstrate over and over that reaching for the sun, for optimism, and for the determination to keep going is sometimes the most courageous choice we can make. Turning towards the sun, opening doors, and striving towards something, in whatever way that looks for you, can be one of the most generative processes you can do.
In another vein, many of the pieces in this issue stand very still, and look about them. Winter in a cold climate isn’t complete without the unearthly hush of new-fallen snow. The pieces here deal with absence, with crossing-outs, and with the complexity of understanding and accepting the place you’re in, and how you got there. They compelled us with clear-eyed, detailed portraits of people, places, and moments that stay with us, and which we hold close to our hearts and minds.
Another thing that pieces did was reach out. Whether to parts of the natural world, to the people around them, or to the reader themselves, the pieces in this issue so often sought to more deeply entwine themselves with the world they are a part of, and to remind us that connection can still be essential, even in a time when it feels dangerous to care for each other.
Helicon’s quarterly issues don’t have a theme; we evaluate each piece as its own piece of art, and not as a part of a whole. But each of the pieces in this issue, I think, can’t help but converse with the others, in unexpected ways. And each one, in a different way, provided a new way of thinking, or a small moment of light, or transported me to somewhere very different for a few precious seconds. I hope they do the same for you.
Happy Reading,
Mika Ellison,
Editor in Chief
The works published herein are the sole property of the writers and artists who created them. No work may be used without the explicit permission of the author or artist.
