Editor’s Letter: Stubbed Toes, Old Stories, and Glue

Written by Perrin Smith, Editor-in-Chief, Illustrated by Adrienne Krozack

My Paw, the Southern way to say grandpa, used to tell great stories. Before he passed away, he told one of his favorites like this: He was a little boy, outside running circles around his childhood home. It was high summer. Hot, humid, miserable. His Mama was tired of all his clodhopping. “Stop it there!” she yelled across the yard. Paw didn’t listen—he never did—and kept on running. Seconds later, his foot snagged a tree root that had twisted its way up through the ground.

Wham. Thud.

He fell flat on his chest.

When he told me this story for the first time, he was leaned back in his favorite recliner. He chuckled. The lesson I should learn from his bruised toe, he said, is to listen. “You got-to pay attention when someone knows a thing or two you don’t.”

For some reason, that story is synonymous to me with identity, our theme for this issue. Maybe it’s because Paw was always telling (and repeating) stories. That was his personality—a part of his identity. When I thought of Paw, I thought of tall tales. Yet now that he’s gone, I think of myself. That maybe my infatuation with storytelling grew from his stories. Perhaps the interest so central to how I view myself developed because of him.

But inspiration and identity aren’t easy things to trace back to their sources.

In her debut novel A Place for Us, Fatima Farheen Mirza wrote the following: “How were they to know the moments that would define them?” These were the thoughts of Hadia, the eldest daughter in a fractured family, as she considered the ways people could hurt one another across years, decades, and never know which actions wounded the deepest—the smallest, most intimate failures or the largest, most cataclysmic?

It’s true for everyone though, ain’t it? How we end up as ourselves is a bit of a mystery. We come into the world with certain facets of our person predefined. We are who we are in so many ways. From childhood to adulthood, we uncover even more about ourselves which we know must have always been there. Still, the time we spend clomping around the earth develops our personalities, too, ever so steadily.

Our actions shape us. So do the actions of others. And the actions of people we may never meet impact us daily. It all forms us, little by little, into who we are. Our favorite movies, shows, books, games, paintings, songs—they all play a role in it. No matter the medium, stories have power. The characters we love are, in a way, just a reflection of ourselves or who we’d like to be. The stories they inhabit offer comfort and provide safe places to explore the world and who we are.

There’s no clear answer as to which moments define us the most. To chart it is messy, and complex, and seemingly impossible. But we try.

When our team set out to create the second issue of Square 95, we knew that the theme “identity” would be open to interpretation. We knew that this topic is so vast, so varied, so intricate, that we would only ever scratch the surface of what makes us, well, us. Even so, while we awaited submissions, we could have hardly dreamed of what it would blossom into.

Dozens of writers, artists, and designers came together to create this beautiful, diverse magazine that you hold in your hands now. Together, they interpreted our theme in ways they were specially positioned to—from profiles about local eccentricities to reporting on how language can influence personality, from the intricate pattern-work that makes up our cover to detailed paintings and designs from artists’ imaginations found further within. They created a mosaic, pieced of their unique views on identity and held together by their ingenuity.

The stories Paw told me from his recliner were the first ones that stayed with me. Even today, I can remember the inflection of his voice as he spoke—which words he enunciated more clearly, which ones he emphasized. That’s the funny thing about stories; they stick with us. Whether we want them to or not, certain ones adhere like they’ve been glued onto our bodies and others fall away. We can’t control it, only pay attention to when it happens.

So, as you dive into the articles and artwork your peers have dedicated their summers to crafting, I have one question: Which of these stories will stick with you?