by Kathy Hill ||

7:51 AM, May 25, 2019—I wake up and without thinking decide to take a shower. Something is on my mind and buzzing, but I can’t quite figure out what it is. I turn on the water, watch steam cover the windows, and then step under a sheet of volcanic moisture. That’s when it hits me: Boldface is over. I am done. My time as the Glass Mountain Editor is finished.

When I was a teenager, my favorite show was House. You know it—the one with the surly doctor who thinks himself smarter and better than everyone else, ignores and taunts patients, berates and breaks down his friends. But there’s an episode tucked deep within the show’s catalog featuring House being his usual terrible self as he demands to a patient, “Are you really going to base your entire life on who you got stuck in a room with?” And the patient replies, “I’m going to base this moment on who I got stuck in a room with. Because that’s what life is: It’s a series of rooms and who you get stuck in those rooms with adds up to what your life is.” For one brief moment, House is different.

I joined Glass Mountain two and a half years ago, beginning as an associate prose editor before becoming Prose Co-Editor, before eventually seeing myself as the Editor-in-Chief. And through that time, I have read pieces of fiction that made me feel a variety of things, attended events that were once full of strangers but by the end became my friends, and I have assisted in the coordination of a conference that first made me understand what it meant to identify as a Writer. Capital-W, Writer. An identity that before all else makes me who I am.

Whether you read that quote from House and understand it to mean a literal four-walls-ceiling-and-floor room or believe it refers simply to the navigation of place, what I believe it means at its foundation is that life comes from people. Coincidence or not, destiny or not, we as humans find ourselves inhabiting a variety of settings alongside dozens of other people who all found themselves there for completely different reasons and will grow and move on to completely different things. Sometimes I see myself as a ghost inhabiting the Glass Mountain staff meetings awestruck that I ended up in the rooms that I have, that all of these people found themselves at a crossroads, Glass Mountain at the end of one of them, and they chose to follow it. We all chose to home ourselves in its pages. And because we all did that, I am different.

I am grateful for every person who chose this magazine. I am grateful for Aubrey Cowley, because she is my better half, someone who makes me laugh and feel understood, who always has coffee and pictures of Jane to offer me. I am grateful for Austin Svedjan who might secretly be the kindest person I know and will dance to the Mii theme with me. I am grateful to Cait Weiss Orcutt for her patient guidance and big-sisterly love, because she showed me Pondicheri. I am grateful to Audrey Colombe for every decision she helped me make, for listening, for helping me grow. I am grateful for Miranda Ramirez for our Lone Stars and cathartic conversations; for Tamara Coleman, Vinh Hoang, and Christian Su for their love of what they do; for Ros and Brenna for jumping in at an insane time and going with the flow of the crazy roller coaster that is Boldface. For Quentin Key-Tello because he is my best friend and I will spend my life with him.

All of these are people who found themselves in the same room and because of them, together and united, I am different. And I think that’s what is amazing about Glass Mountain and why I can’t imagine who I will be without it, but I am so excited to go on the adventure of finding out. I can say without a doubt that Boldface 2019 was the most wonderful Boldface I’ve had the privilege of participating in. The attendees were kind, thought-provoking souls, and the Featured Writers, Bryan Washington, Jessica Wilbanks, and Jason Koo, offered wisdom and joy that makes pursuing a writing career feel like something worthwhile. It feels genuine; it feels real. This conference is everything.

I don’t know what the future for Glass Mountain holds, but I am eager to find out. Thank you to everyone for choosing to inhabit that space with me. Thank you for the laughter, tears, joy, confusion, conversations, for the chance to become something different.

Now, we can all take a deep breath because this moment is over. We are done. We made it. And I like to think we are better people because of it.