Astre

While we can’t hope to trump the joy of 2020 finally ending, it is with no small pleasure that we bring you our winter issue, Astre. As the title, which means otherworldly and celestial, suggests, the pieces and art within were all created with the stars on our minds. We hope this serves as a fitting end to an otherworldly year. 

2020 brought along its challenges to our publication, as it did to all other aspects of life. However, the nature of art makes it uniquely unaffected by the various constraints of the world, and so our magazine strove to not only continue our activities and maintain our quality, but to improve and implement change as well. We began to hold syllabus meetings this year, a more structured and curriculum-like version of the activity meetings we held before, in an effort to further sharpen the skills of our members. We forced egregious team bonding on our members through Zoom, getting to know each other better in our element as our artists showed off their skills in skribbl.io and our writers spun tales about murder in Among Us. We engaged in new PR ventures, such as Struggle Tweet Sunday, which are conspicuously Instagram posts and not actual tweets. We also opened up a subscription, which you can sign up for through this link or on our front page, through which you can receive the newsletters we release each issue. 

So come along with us. Let us take your hands and pull you through worlds of fantastical cravings, feasts of the sun and stars, otherworldly and ordinary romances. Sink deeper, and meet magical grandmas, lonely seamstresses, transactional lovers, and racing aliens. So many more stories reside in the cosmos above, where our dreams float to heights unknown.  

Whether you are a current member coming to admire you and your peers’ work, an alumni checking back in, a nervous college applicant binging pieces as you wait for results to come out, or a curious lover of literature and art browsing through our issues, we thank you sincerely for reading and hope you will come back for more.

– Vertigo Editors (2020-21)