Dear Readers,

Our third issue is now here! Just a few weeks ago was the one year anniversary of our magazine (marked by our first Instagram post on April 24th 2024); as one of our first goals was to successfully publish three issues a year, we’re proud to say that the release of Issue 3 completes our first year-long cycle. We couldn’t be more proud of how far we’ve come in just one year, and we can’t wait to share what’s next for Jelly Squid – we already have some exciting developments in the works for the near future.

Issue three (as you likely already know) is our Proximity issue, which feels like an aptly themed issue to come to fruition around the time of our one year anniversary. We find ourselves, in many ways, aligning the idea of proximity with the idea of perspective – particularly, perspective as it flows from the artist, and also as it flows into the experiential space which the audience brings their own perspective to. Proximity also infers time and space – even the word itself calls to attention an awareness of how we take up space, how we move through the world. The idea of proximity is far-reaching and vast; it calls to mind questions of distance, and the role distance plays in art-making. Where does inspiration take us? How is our proximity to the world around us inspiring us to write or make art? Where do our struggles to create manifest in relation? When we look out at the world, we may find ourselves farther than we wish to be from what or who we desire – how do we use art to attempt to bridge those gaps? All of these questions and more play across the expanse of writing and art in this issue. Contained here, within a field of clover, are twenty unique pieces of writing and art; they reach out to you, the reader, hoping to find themselves proximal to you, to your wishes, to your desires.

“Oregon was always too big for me,” Jolynne Mallory writes in flash fiction Megalophobia, her words scanning the expanse of the landscape. “I watch the trees catch fire and pretend I do not hear it,” writes Ella Pheasant in her poem, I Could Blame it on the Air, where words are placed on the page with the strength and intention of a sky full of smoke. “Jack’s mind spiralled into branches I could not reach,” Libby Hsieh writes in their essay In Passing, where the theme of distance is as deep and indelible as the roots of a tree. Proximity’s presence in this issue is often solidified within the context of nature – it’s no coincidence that nearly all of our writers and artists in this issue ground the emotional aspects of their work using elements of the natural world.

As people, one thing we all share is our proximity to nature – we are from it, and no matter how much we choose to engage with and return to it, many elements of our very modern lives place us at a distance from nature, unsettling something inside of us. It is a comfort, however – and especially noteworthy given the oncoming of spring – to see that so many of us have nature on our minds. That when confronted with feelings of longing, we still look to the trees, to the grass, to the stars – that even when we feel distant, the earth and the sky are still here to remind us of our place. We hope that this reassuring presence of nature finds you again and again as you read this issue, and as you take what you’ve read and seen in Jelly Squid with you into your day-to-day life, into the world.
Eighteen contributors; twenty pieces; infinite perspectives. We hope this issue, rather than answering questions, inspires you to ask them – to wonder more about the people in your life, the things you want, the things you fear. Nothing is ever so far away as we think.

– Mo Buckley Brown & Anya Jane Perez