Letter from the Guest Editor
Leah Jiazi Joseph
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What is home and how do we find it? How do we make sense of it? It is difficult to unwrap the layers of the definition, as they range from the physical dwelling where your belongings are, the area you’re from, the country you live in, or the people you’re around. Maybe the people who surround you make you feel at home, but the city you live in is isolating. Maybe your home no longer exists and the only pieces of it left are in your memory. Maybe the country that you live in—once a place of hope, promise, and freedom—has turned on you and revealed itself to be a facade.
The messy, contradictory nature of what home is and what it ought to be is what I wanted to focus on in this issue of Boudin. Finding it is complicated, especially for those who are far from home or cannot go back. But one way to navigate it without having to physically be there is to write about it. All of the work in this issue focuses on some aspect of home and belonging that speak the unspeakable. Some stories involve the feeling of coming home. Others are about home being brutally taken from you.
I specifically focused on narratives of immigration and displacement not only because of my personal experience with being an immigrant, but because of the increase in hatred towards people who have been displaced or who have immigrated. When people try to suppress these stories, it is important to make them louder. For immigrants, there is an extra layer of meaning. Extra complication that many people do not understand and will not understand unless we express it through our art. Our stories matter.
A huge thank you to all who submitted to this issue, our contributors, and the Boudin team. I was so impressed and honored by the amount of submissions we received. Working on this issue was so meaningful to me, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to share it.
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To learn more about submitting your work to Boudin or applying to McNeese State University’s Creative Writing MFA program, please visit Submissions for details.
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