Editors' Note

Dear Reader,

Eucalyptus Lit is no longer young. 

At times, it’s easy to forget where we began. “Hypothesis: the universe was born // as an act of violence.” Le Wang understands a creation that begins amid rupture. At dawn, we enter a world foreign, unrelenting. But between sky and broken earth, we pave cobble paths and build gardens. Like all those before us, we create our own words for being.

Today, riding the summer heat, we come to you with Juvenescence, our sixth issue. These works tread a thin line between the ordinary and the fantastical, as if return or renewal, as if an impossible loop in time. Watching families through the ice cream parlour window—through the impassable barrier of memory—Katie Lin’s narrator wonders “if that was us ten years ago, or maybe me ten years from now.” Just as history is often cyclical, so too do our lives map out circles. Often, we find this disquiet. Sometimes it is consolation. 

In the spirit of juvenescence, we embrace our own season of renewal. SJ Kennedy Scott decides “I would leave in the autumn. // I hoped to come back different.” Come fall, Eucalyptus Lit will welcome a new editor-in-chief and a larger team, ready to bring their own energy, vision, and curiosity to the magazine. Meanwhile, the three of us will move on to focus on Eucalyptus as a whole, a broader organization that will support writing and writers in all stages of their careers. 

We want to thank you, sincerely, for these past two years. For all those days and nights running this magazine, reading and writing, helping preserve—together—our devotion to the written word. You have brought us unimaginable joy.

“I believe / that the heart of the world / is big enough for me,” writes Rebecca Uhlman. We enter this world as dreamers. But language bears witness to what once seemed boundless. To write something is to dream it true. Come—all the doors are open. We’ll find ourselves in the business of dreaming a world into being—

—big enough to hold us all.   

With you,

Iris, Felix, and Jessica

Eucalyptus Lit
 

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Special thanks to Lara Chamoun for contributing to this note.