by Amanda Keill ||
Spring 2020
What a way to end the semester. Currently coping with COVID-19, graduating, and watching our era’s Civil Rights movement begin has really made my brain reflect on the journey that lead us to this point. Of course, all of our lives changed. Whether we choose to participate in the attempt to flatten the curve or we ignore the world and continue on with life, we are all still altered. And that’s perfectly okay. One thing will remain—writers will keep writing. Now, you may not be writing currently, you may not write for a while, but because that blood of a writer pumps through your veins, you are going to want to let that story out. Whether it be through fiction or nonfiction, poetry, a blog, a letter on a napkin, any of it, we will write.
Students across the globe have gone through hardships, but I want to take this space for a moment to not only honor the students of University of Houston, but also the graduating class of Spring 2020 everywhere. We have faced so many hardships to get here, yet we kept on with our studies, our goals. Here in Houston, we kept going after Harvey, an ice storm, Imelda, that one time the entire city flooded because of a busted pipe, COVID-19, switching to online classes; maybe some of us lost our jobs, or a family member. Maybe some of us didn’t make it.
But in the end humanity kept going. We are creating a Revolution by standing up for justice and letting it be known that Black Lives Matter. Trans Lives Matter. Me Too marches forward. Children do not belong in cages. We are changing the world even though for years now we’ve almost destroyed it and yet it fights back harder. We are going into the future with the hopes to create a better one and to always fight for justice.
To the writers, we kept writing through all of it. Maybe you can’t write right now and that’s okay. Maybe you haven’t stopped writing since the beginning. Maybe you are a new writer and your spark has finally been ignited. And to the artists. To humanity.
To the Glass Mountain staff of Fall 2019 – Spring 2020, we are some badasses. We completed our 24th volume. We produced an online writers conference within a matter of weeks, and it was extremely successful. Shout out to Grace Wagner, our Graduate Advisor for the year.
To everyone reading this,
Just keep writing.
