Welcome to the East Window Journal of Written and Visual Arts, volume 2/1.

This issue is a space of resistance, an approach toward seeing, loving, grieving, returning.

Across these pages, you'll encounter works that confront the enduring brutality of Islamophobia, sexual violence, authoritarianism, and the attempted erasure of indigeneity. These pieces do not merely reflect oppression; they intervene in it. They assert that to speak, to make, to remember, and to love in the face of wanton human abrogation is a radical act. From the reclamation of Two-Spirit identities to the insurgent tenderness of queer love and trans activism, the contributions here imagine a world beyond the structures that seek to silence, control, discipline, or vanish our bodies and stories.

There are works that understand erasure as both a threat and a strategy. What does it mean to disappear in defiance? What does it mean to leave traces deliberately, for someone else to find and carry forward? The queer archive is alive in this issue - not simply as a repository of the past, but as a mechanism for historical intervention - a way to remake what has been taken away and imagine what has never yet been.

This is a journal of rupture and repair. It is a place where love is not apolitical but rather a revolutionary form of care. It is a return to truths that were buried, a future spoken into being, and a refusal to forget. We thank the contributors of this issue (selected from an open call for submissions as well as by invitation) for sharing their truths and their stories within our pages.

Welcome. Let this be a home for the work that will not remain silent.

— EAST WINDOW EDITORIAL TEAM, 2025