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It’s hard to believe that my time as a part of Elan is coming to an end. For the past two years my experience on this staff has built so much of who I am today. Freshman year, before I even really knew what Elan was, I knew that I wanted to be a part of it one day. For two years now, I’ve made so many memories and learned skills that I’ll not only take with me after graduation, but also that I’ll cherish forever. When I first joined the staff, I had no idea all of the incredible opportunities I’d be introduced to. I didn’t know all the wonderful events I’d be a part of. Listening to the seniors talk about their roles and the things they’d been a part of the previous year, I was struck with wonder. For so long I’d felt like I didn’t play a big enough role in the creative writing department and this was how I could change it; by becoming involved, taking advantage of the opportunities that come with being on the staff. At the time, I wasn’t sure what position I’d take on, I didn’t think it’d be something serious at all. When I took on the role of Submissions Editor, I had no clue what it would lead into, that I’d become Managing Editor this year. I wouldn’t have had it any other way, though, because this position has been one of growth and maturity for me. I was quiet, invisible almost, for the first years of high school. Joining Elan and taking on those responsibilities was the push I needed to finally open myself up some (now, some of my teachers wish I would stop talking). Being a part of a team pushes you, required a constant input. This year more than anything, I had to step out of my comfort zone to make sure things were getting done when they were needed. I was afraid of making my classmates think I was being controlling that I didn’t really want to do it, but I had to step past that fear and find a way to ask for things within deadline without being demanding. But also, without being soft. In that way, Elan has pushed me in growth. One of my greatest memories of Elan is last year, once the seniors had gone, and it was just the four juniors with Mrs. Melanson. Having that first chance to open the print book and think, wow, my staff created this. My friends wrote these pieces. This art. In that moment, I stepped back and thought of the voice this book has in the world. Because even though our reach is still growing, we are mighty. And our words have power. That’s when I realized, too, how much my own writing matters. Because even though it hadn’t been published, that book was proof that words and feelings matter. So do my own. There are so many things Elan has showed me. So many endless memories from the stress of planning homecoming to last year’s excitement of new submissions and web updates. This staff has changed me in ways I’d never imagined possible. Beautiful, crazy ways. - Kinley Dozier, Senior Managing Editor

As a senior who hadn’t been on the staff in the past, I had no idea what to expect going in. I had friends on the staff in the past and knew about blind readings and all that stuff that goes with literary magazines but I had no idea what I could contribute to Elan. I always thought to myself- what was my role? Once I got assigned art editor I knew it was the perfect role for me. Everything I had always done in my writing time had been centered around art. I loved seeing weird, abstract things and shaping them into a disgusting, gruesome poem. Or seeing something so beautiful and big that it encouraged me to share whatever story I had myself. Art has been my biggest inspiration for my work because of the complexities and the way people bend the rules to art so frequently. Because of this, my time as an art editor has been greatly enhanced. I loved seeing submissions come in that were so beautiful and eye-catching but also carried such deep meaning, whether it be in context with a writing piece or not. The thing about Elan art is that all the pieces stand out on their own and almost don’t need explanation. As a writer, my own work, as I said, had already been greatly influenced by art. Elan gave me that accessibility into a world I never even knew about. We managed events that involved heavy discussion with art liaisons where we learned about their world and ours. I learned so much individually about how art is managed and all the requirements they have to meet and their creative thought process as well. It was incredibly inspiring to see kids working on the Coffeehouse mural, for example, and see how they took a small sketch and turned it into this big, beautiful mural despite everyday life struggles and only a two week deadline. It helped make me crack down on my writing and push through during the hard times. As a student, Elan has taught me many things that I definitely could take with me into the future. It’s really taught me about the value of team work and doing things on time. Elan was probably one of the only classes I would try and be as on time with assignments as possible. I knew if I didn’t get something in on time that I was jeopardizing other people’s roles and responsibilities and making the book process slower. Nothing was ever rushed but it was important to have the respect for one another to get things on time. It also taught me that hard work pays off. During my year on the staff, I have seen beautiful events take place from homecoming to Yellowhouse that have really blown me away. Walking through Yellowhouse and seeing all the art and writing that everyone put together and laid out into a physical book was pretty jaw dropping. Not to mention everything that was student led and put together. Elan teaches you that even when you’re working hard you know you’re going to see a beautiful end result. - Natalie Filaroski,  Senior Art Editor

It’s strange to be writing my final blog post for this staff. Since I started them as a junior, being a part of Elan Literary Magazine has taught me an unbelievable amount about what it means to be a writer, a leader, even to be an independent person – lessons I’ll keep with me in my next stage of life, in college. Being part of Elan has been a part of my growing up. I stepped onto the staff not sure what my role was going to be, pretty doubtful it would include something so full of responsibility and challenges. However, listening to the senior staff members at the time caught my attention. I wanted to find something new, something that would test me in new ways. High school was, I’m sad to say, getting a bit boring. I was tired of moving from class to class, only picking up the information I needed for the next round of testing, before moving on to something else. I wanted to learn what it would be like to dedicate my time and energy entirely to a single goal, and watch it pay off to something much larger than a test. Being part of this staff has, in fact, been challenging in more ways than I could have anticipated. Learning how to be an editor is learning how to make snap decisions, but also build up a great deal of tiny details over long periods of time. It’s coordinating a large group of people, but also honing in on your own judgement, and learning to trust your decisions to lead the staff forward. Creating the 2017 Print Book was a crucial moment for me. The senior staff members were on their way out, and it became overwhelmingly clear that I was about to become the head of this process. There was so much that needed to get done, a whole slew of tiny, tiny details. We had totally unforeseen challenges, and I had to adapt, come up with creative solutions by discussing our situations with the faculty advisor and other staff members. In the end, when we had the 2017 Print Issue in our hands, I realized why I had been putting so much work into the magazine. I got to hold this tangible collection of young voices, all creating and trying to comprehend the world around them. It felt like every art piece and every writing piece were in a collaboration, part of a larger whole which could express how student artists and writers were navigating themselves in a world that was rapidly changing between 2016-2017. It was one of Elan’s most political issues, and by curating these pieces, I realized how much even students had the power to express injustice and a need for change. How crucial it us for us to speak our minds, because, in doing so, real drive for change results. In my own future, as I head to college, in a position to conduct research in the STEM fields, I’m carrying these lessons about art into the broader perspectives. Because being part of Elan is not just about reading and writing. It’s about setting the framework for a better world, a world we want to see: where everyone has a voice, and everyone is empowered to search for themselves. Being an editor allowed me to work with these future goals, these young agents for change, and it’s taught me how much I need to keep working for a better world, whether in a lab or selecting writing to publish, and trying to reach the biggest community possible. - Ana Shaw, Editor-In-Chief #Elan #Future #Growth #Leadership

The clean lines of her newest, most popular poetry book were so soft in the palms of my hands that it almost felt like a crime when I stained it with my black ballpoint pen. Every word was so meaningful to me that I book marked several poems with big blocks around a whole stanza, or sometimes a whole poem would be sectioned. There are dozens of little brightly colored Post Its hanging on to the edge of pages, like bookmarks for me to find my most favorite lines or poems without having to bend the neat pages back. I was assigned Natasha Trethewey for a poetry project but if I’m honest, I think Natasha Trethewey assigned me to herself. What I mean by this is that I felt like she took over my life when I was supposed to be investigating hers and learning about her work. Trethewey may as well be a doctor because she brought back to life my poetry. Its an experience reading her work, like sitting the bed of your parents and letting the pillows sink beneath your weight. Every poem I read in Natasha Trethewey’s book, “Native Guard”, was like a heart to heart with her. There were lines, like “My back to my mother, leaving her where she lay.” in Graveyard Blues shattered me. The whole book left me breathless, almost like she had bloomed a flower of faith in me. A line like that, one that it’s honesty is more important than making the reader feels something artificial, is the line I starve for when I read poetry. Let’s examine these lines; “For the slave, having a master sharpens / the bend into work, the way the sergeant / moves us now to perfect battalion drill, / dress parade.” Absorb this, understand that these lines came from a poem about the black soldiers who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. This poem, titled Native Guard is basically a journal entry of one of these soldiers. Natasha Trethewey created a book of poetry that one of the Pulitzer Prize and moved my heart back into its rightful poetry state. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2012-2014 because of her poems on racism and family conformation. She changed the face of poetry in the US with her elegiac verse. Natasha Trethewey opened a world for me all about her and the life of African Americans. Her personal experience made me think of every moment in my life similar to hers. Whenever I feel like my poetry is running its head into the sand, I flip through Native Guard and read poems like “Myth,” “At Dusk,” “The Southern Crescent,” and “My Mother Dreams Another Country.” Her poems lift me from whatever rut I’m in and make me feel like my brain is growing bigger and bigger. - Valerie Busto, Creative Non-Fiction/Fiction Editor

At the start of my freshman year of high school, I did not know how to write. I knew that I wanted to write, and I knew that I had a lot to say, but I hadn’t quite figured out how to articulate any of it. The poem that changed all of that for me was “Killing Flies” by Michael Dickman. I stumbled upon it by chance, and I was immediately captivated. The opening lines grabbed me and pulled me into a situation that I had never come close to experiencing, but that I somehow felt incredibly connected to: “I sit down for dinner with my dead brother again This is the last dream I ever want to have Passing the forks around the table, passing the knives There’s nothing to worry about” – Killing Flies These lines stunned me, and expertly conveyed grief in just a few words. This poem came at an important time for me, and showed me the way that words can affect people in a way that can’t always be explained. During freshman year, I experienced the loss of purpose that comes with being 15. I was writing all the time for school, but I didn’t really know why. I didn’t feel like I was doing anything important. After reading this poem, I understood why. As much as I love Dickman’s craft, I can’t say that is specifically what draws me to his work. Rather, it’s the unexplainable feeling I get each time I read one of his pieces. The most valuable advice I was ever given as a writer was that specificity is your friend. In a lot of my early writing, I was trying to be as general as possible. I wanted to write what I thought people wanted to read, and I tried to be relatable to everyone. I was a 15 year old girl pretending like I lived in New York City, or played guitar in a band, or was struggling through college. In Michael Dickman’s poems, nothing is ever general. The detail is astounding, whether he is talking about his deceased brother, his relationship with his father, or Emily Dickinson. “You eat the forks, all the knives, asleep and waiting on the white tables What do you love? I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on despite worms or fire I love our stomachs turning over the earth” – My Autopsy These lines strike me in ways I can’t explain, but the feeling I get when I read his work resonates through me. In a way, this feeling is what I am searching for in what I read, and what I am striving to produce in what I write. Michael Dickman taught me how to speak, how to be honest about the things that it hurts to be honest about. Now, I know that I can find myself, and by extension my writing, inside his poetry. - Meredith Abdelnour, Junior Layout and Design Editor

As a young writer, though I didn't realize it at the time, I was completely enamored and thus shaped by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. I took on a full understanding of a poem for the first time through his poem, "Alone". I chose to interpret this poem for a speech class I had freshman year and, from the seemingly random personal connection I stumbled upon, I felt less fearful of my own emotions I deemed irrelevant or too difficult to understand. From there, I bought a full collection of his work and even wrote several pieces in his characteristically dark and dramatic manner. I believe Poe to be the reason I was able to convert my understanding of poetry from the need to rhyme to the need to express emotion that is so honest it reflects the overall human condition and allows solace in such. The influence of Poe has carried over into my junior year of high school as well. Junior year being a year known to be targeted by college officials looking over transcripts, academics have gained the ability to encroach on my writing life. This only led to a substantial drain upon inspiration to write and, even more dramatically, a drain upon my desire to put effort into understanding my emotions enough to put them in complex, thoughtful writing. I again reconnected to Poe when we were given several copies of his pieces to read in a writing class, one of the pieces being "The Raven". It was not until this year that I was aware of my ability to connect and find even deeper understanding in pieces due to an accumulation of past experiences since my first connection to an artist like Poe. Therefore, the meaning of Poe's heavier works became much more complex and interesting to me. In this, Poe once again fortified my need to write. Most memorably, the piece that I produced intentionally drawn from the work of Poe was a piece I did not submit for any classes I had. Rather, I just sat down and wrote in a notebook a poem that came from the heart instead of a prompt. It came from a connection as well as a need to sort through the complications I had been facing then. The poem was not exactly grounded in the way that Poe does, but it was honest and one of the few things I've crafted that I feel connected to as I know it is not something I'd want others to read. I realize that it has potential to be shared and understood, but I feel that comfort with that level of publicity of self is something i still need to work on. Again, Poe can serve as a role model for this as well. Though I'm not quite a complete expert on the actions of Poe in his mental process of publication, I still recognize that he put himself in his work and chose to put it out into the world at one point or another. I wish to follow my own footsteps, of course, but it's always good to have a guiding inspiration to look to ahead. - Kathryn Wallis, Junior Art Editor

Billy Collins has always been on of my biggest inspirations as a poet. I discovered in my freshman year of highschool and at first I didn’t really like him. Actually, I didn’t really like any poets but I remember one Christmas morning my grandpa handed me a small stack of poetry books. He told me he knew I was having trouble with my poetry and he saw these at a garage sale for a few dollars and thought they might help. Stuck in between Robert Hass and Yeats was a book by Collins. I think the cover attracted me more than the actual poetry did. I didn’t really touch the books for about a month or so, until one day I was assigned to write about poem. Poetry was terrifying to me, I thought it was way to over my head for me to even consider being a poet. So I turned to the small stack of books that had been collecting dust silently on my desk. I reached for the Collins book and flipped through, until one poem stuck out to me. It was about yellow bathtub ducks he’d found in a drug store one night. Don’t ask me why I liked this poem so much because I wouldn’t really have an answer for you. But that one poem opened something for me. Pretty soon I started seeing the beauty in all of his poem. The simplistic language, the beautiful imagery, the emotions I found hidden in each sentence. Collins isn’t the type of writer to write directly about his emotions. He always finds an image or an action to zone in one and he makes you feel it for yourself, instead of describing it. And I can tell you now, that for someone who hates talking about her feelings or sharing any type of personal information with stranger, this type of technique really intrigues me. In a lot of ways Collins opened the door to the poetry world and sort made me see that not everything has to be complicated pros and metaphors that nobody understands. It was be simple, pleasant. You don’t have to rip through your emotional conscious or tear apart traumatic memories to get a good poem. Sometimes you can just write about the rain drops of a window or yellow bathtub ducks you find in a drug store. Sometime when I’m sitting in front of my computer not being able to come up with anything, I’ll feel that fear inside of me. That fear that I’ll never be able to write poetry the way I’m “supposed” too, but Collins always finds a way to remind me that there will never be a specific way to write poetry. You write what you feel, what you see, what you experience. You write your truth. - Sierra Lunsford, Web Editor

Meditation at Lagunitas, a Robert Hass classic, changed the way I write poetry. Every time I read it, I grasp something I missed before. On my first read, I grasped this emotional connection but to what I wasn’t sure. This idea of making the reader feel something they didn’t know existed within them, nor know how or why, was new and brilliant to me. I soon fell into the trap, which is intentionally set from the beginning, of being so intrigued I had to know how Hass was able to pull this emotional connection out of me, although I barely understood the context of the poem at the time. Once I read the poem a second time, I found evidence in the subtle switch from a macro, philosophical view of the world to another view that was much more micro and personal. The poem starts out, “All of the new thinking is about loss” and from there builds upon human experience which creates the series of lines, “But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread/ the thing her father said that hurt her, what/ she dreamed”. The switch adds layers to what could have been a simple poem. Typically, my own poems are about human experiences, but I am always looking for ways to make them more dynamic than what is on the surface. I find myself so inspired by Hass’ ability to do this, that I tend to follow suit by building upon the experience with more than the physical. Suddenly salt is describing the faults and impurities in a relationship. Light is no longer so happy, types of light take the form of the darkness and showcase the ugly and unmanageable parts about being in a relationship. I do this in trying to master the flow of reality with other-worldly, macro and micro, that Hass showcases in all his poems. In the poem Misery and Splendor, Hass uses setting to create juxtaposing images. With lines like, “Morning, maybe it is evening…” and “Outside,/ the day is slowly succeeded by night,/ succeeded by day…”, the reader is imagining conflicting images. One light and beautiful and another dark and long. This allows the reader to feel the confusion, the back and forth, the speaker and the character of the poem feels. The confusion of most human-to-human interactions. Hass also plays with time. In some parts of the poem, there is this splendor in how quickly time is passing by and in others you feel the misery in how slow time is moving. All of this represents the what-could-have-been and what-is central idea of the poem. With all these dynamics, there has to be some kind of grounding factor. In the case of Misery and Splendor Hass contains the dynamics with this everlasting image of light and his use of statements. The quality of light dictates how intensity of a moment. This couple is in this other room where light is “flowing” through it but the statement goes to say, “They feel themselves at the center of a powerful/ and baffled will...”. Reading any of Robert Hass’ poems, I am put into the mindset of what truly mastered craft is. I find that the more I read of his poems, the more it is natural for me to incorporate his techniques into my own writing and that has gotten me through a lot of rough patches in my writing. Whenever I find a new technique used in a Hass poem, I immediately try to incorporate that same technique into my own poems. - Lex Hamilton, Co-Marketing Editor/Soical Media Editor

I feel as though, whenever I’m having trouble digesting something or with my writing, I find myself going back through my origins. My roots. By this, I mean where my writing began. What has inspired me the most. I’ve read and been introduced to so many words and pieces and writers through my journey of being a writer of my own. The first poem I can really remember being hit by, my breath taken away from such a small amount of lines, I read my freshman year of high school. I found the piece scrolling through a website for inspiration and got just that. Matt Rasmussen’s, “After Suicide [a Hole is Nothing]” struck something deep within me. Blew some fuse that hadn’t really been lit yet, not so early on in my experience with the writing program. This poem was the first one I’d read and really understood, I think. Before, most of the writing I’d been introduced to had gone over my head, with meanings and messages too layered, too thick and dense for my young arms to grasp correctly. Too much for me to understand. The brevity and specificity of this poem grabbed onto me. How much Rasmussen was able to say, the depth of the emotions he describes in so short a number of lines was unreal. It was almost like an epiphany for me, reading that poem. That was the moment I realized I could write about anything. I could take something so deeply personal to me and put it on the drawing board, stretch those emotions I felt to the reader and allow them to sit in on the moment with me. Before then, I hadn’t really thought there was room for my own feelings in my writing, but rather those of a character. I understood, when I read Rasmussen’s poem, that it was real. Even if it wasn’t his experience exactly, it was something he’d felt. Some sort of grief or loss. A longing. To say I’ve attempted an emulation of Rasmussen’s poem would be to say I tried to write. That, of course, if what I’ve been doing from the moment I discovered the poem. However, I don’t think I achieved that level of personality and authenticity in my own poems until this year, when I dug so deep into myself that it began to hurt. That’s when I started to put myself into the writing, the things I’d experienced, or thought of, or felt. That longing, not matter what it may be for, belongs in the writing. It needs to be there. - Kinley Dozier, Senior Managing Editor

The only time I have really felt discouraged from my writing was when I assumed that writing had to add up to something profound. Over two months ago, I read “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop and it reassured me that what I was doing was fine. In my own writing, I spend a lot of time on the textual details of every sense—sight, taste, sound, smell, and touch. I think that my biggest insecurity came from believing that no one cared for the details. In a fiction story, the details are the most important part. Since my focus is in poetry at the moment, I was nervous to give too much to the reader. Naturally, I give everything away with taking the reader to the specific moment instead of telling them. Every time I read “The Fish” it speaks to something different. The first time I read it, I was convinced that it was about the inevitable realization and last fight of death. In literal terms, I think that this poem is successful in showing that. It’s easy to get lost in the descriptive details. My favorite lines were “I stared and stared and victory filled up/the little rented boat/from the pool of bilge/ where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine.” I fell in love with these lines because it reminded me of the slippery love/anti love and triumph/victory that can be applied to any situation in writing. I was amazed how linear and cohesive all the images felt. Even reading the poem out loud was swift and rolled off the tongue easily. The couple of jarring lines added to the effect of disruption in the poem, which aided to the personal experience I felt. I wasn’t just thinking about this fish, I was thinking about myself. Reading this poem when I was going through insecurities in my own writing has made me question if other writers feel the same. Recently, I learned that Elizabeth bishop went through countless and countless drafts of the poem before finally publishing it. She held on to the poem for years, probably altering a couple of words or staying up all night not knowing what was missing. Keeping the poem for so many years makes me wonder when Elizabeth decided that the poem was finally “done.” After reading the poem again, at a different point in my writing, I can see the vulnerability and beauty of the fish as symbolism of who the speaker is. Every time I read the poem, I find myself learning new things about myself and how I am feeling, solely based on the mood I am in. “The Fish” is coated in metaphors and descriptive language that speaks nothing but truth and identity. - Evelyn Alfonso, Poetry Editor

Someone sent me a copy of “A Small Needful Fact”, its top right corner torn just a little into the words. It was the first poem of Ross Gay’s I had ever read, and since, I’ve been hooked by this poet-community orchardist. One year, I memorized and performed his “Ode to the Puritan in Me” for one of our poetry classes. It’s a poem whose words seem to tumble from themselves, coming from some unsourceable place, and trilling outwards until no reader can deny an impossible beauty in the world. Gay somehow manages to take the smallest, most personal moments of our existence, and string them out further, and further, making the reader gasp and feel the sky somewhere above them, the rich dirt somewhere beneath them. As a nature lover, there was something instinctually grabbing about Gay’s poetry. He often draws from his experiences as a community orchardist in Indiana in his most recent book, A Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude. As the title suggests, the natural world becomes a leaping-off point for entirely down-to-earth spiritual revelations in the form of deep gratitude. Gay works with trees and dirt and fruit to speak beyond the categories of natural and human.  “A Small Needful Fact” is a response to Eric Garner, but instead of the brutality of his death, we get this delicate image of Garner’s hands, working for the “Parks and Rec. / Horticulture Department...put gently into the earth / some plants”. The image of these plants and all they serve is developed to a heartbreaking realization through the course of the poem of the fact of a life that was lost. It’s a political poem that sees, undeniably, human kind with a compassion more akin to a monk than a poet. On a level of craft, Gay tends to linger on form that enforces the overwhelming revelation so often present in his work. In A Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, he tends towards long poems, covering several pages, but with clipped line breaks. Most notably, “Ode to the Fig Tree on Ninth and Christian”, one of the more recognized poems from the collection, with lines of about three words apiece. From the opening moment of the poem: Tumbling through the / city in my / mind”, the short lines are serving a clear purpose. This is truly a tumbling piece, a man slipping from city to tree to sweet figs to all the people standing around him, and onward to much larger ideas. The line breaks keep the reader digging, rushing along to see what comes next, and so we are kept in tempo with the speaker. Reading this piece on the verge of my own true poetry education, I began to realize the purpose poetry serves in a world that has prose to tell stories and communicate characters. A poem cannot be really read without becoming part of its collective experience. The form often forces us to do so in an immediate sense. The associative leaps, a few moments later, really take the brain spinning into another experience, accepting the limitations and lens of this new world by becoming it. Inspired by Gay, I began to take risks with form: at first with the obvious line clipping, and then by gently weaning my narrative frame of thought towards something more honest to the human thought, allow myself to take some leaps when writing. Ross Gay teaches me, every time I read his lines, of a larger and deeper unity in the world than we can normally imagine. He also teaches me, as a writer, to expand my definition of what will connect with a reader, and become more honest on the page: whether that honesty is through form or subject. - Ana Shaw, Senior Editor-in-Chief

The piece “Escape” by Maya Halko, which appears in the 2017 print edition, always strikes me. Every time I come across it, I find something new that I hadn’t noticed before. I am mesmerized by the flow of the lines and the simplistic black and grey coloring. The fish placed in the bowl rather than another astronaut pulls the whole piece together. When I look at the piece through my writer’s lens I don’t just see art; I see the story that is being told and I understand it. The intricate detail put into this piece is like every detail I do and do not choose to put in to my poems. I think to myself, “What will really say what I mean?” That is, in my opinion, what makes a piece strong: the details used to add another layer of complexity to the concepts or ideas being represented. What will strike an emotion action out of my readers? Although I am not exactly sure what I feel when I look at this piece, it is so awing that I feel a lot, particularly in my chest. When I look at this piece, all I want to do is write. It is ironic because there are often times when I feel like I need to escape or get away and I turn to writing, but I never know what to do when I need to escape or get away from writing. This piece reminds me of moments like those. When the words are not coming how I want them to and when the emotions are so powerful that my poem turns out emotionless. I did not clearly understand this the first time I flipped through the 2017 print book and saw this piece of art. I was mesmerized but I did not understand. The emotion came sometime after I was able to swallow and take in what was going on. Writing is the same in that sense. We want our readers to feel first. Then, after that, they are allowed to understand what they feel and how we were able to make them feel it. As artist, we like to twist our audience’s emotions. We say, “I get to make you feel and there is nothing you can do about it.” In connection to Elan, “Escape” represents the power art holds. Whether it is a paint brush or a pen, we own the right to mark our place on this earth. When I think about the work and purpose Elan stands for, I always think of the same thing first: we are here to give artist a voice. We open up our doors for artist and offer a home for their work that allows, not only for others to be able to acknowledge their gift but also, for someone to look at their art or read their piece and be changed by it. That is our power as artist. - Lex Hamilton, Co-Marketing/Social Media Editor