Struck Anew by Hattie Myers

Editorials

Shock occasions change. Five years ago ROOM flashed into being as an immediate response to the 2016 US election. Psychoanalysts who had never written before felt compelled to write. ROOM has remained a participatory community platform, grounded in a psychoanalytic understanding of how change happens. Each issue archives a new moment. Each is a “working-through” of that which has already passed. But now we are struck anew. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine occurred during the final weeks of production of this anniversary issue. Still, the questions posed by the contributors in ROOM 2.22 are eerily prescient and speak collectively for all of us. Each looks toward a future none can envision.

Remembering Lydia by Jeanne Parr Lemkau

Essays

Whenever I dismounted at Lydia’s home of gray boards and dried palm grass, her son hastened to hitch and water my horse while Lydia offered me lemonade and a spell of rest. Then she would walk with me among the shacks of her community, introducing me to other villagers and discussing her concerns about the health needs of her town.

Construction 6 ©Liliana Zavaleta

Liliana Zavaleta

Art

Liliana Zavaleta is a visual artist who was born in Lima, Perú. She grew up in the United States and has lived and studied in Europe, the Near East, and South America. Zavaleta obtained her university degrees in French and Latin American Literature. She also studied at Parsons School of Design and was an award-winning art director before dedicating herself to her art work. Today she works full-time on her two- and three-dimensional visual work, dividing her time between Upstate New York and South America.

Hope in the Anthropocene Age by Ryan LaMothe

Essays

Most of the graduate students I teach are preparing to work in the Catholic Church. Many of them think, without question, that hope is always a good thing. This is understandable, given that they, like Christians from other denominations, believe that hope is a virtue and despair a vice.

The Day I Learned I Was a Woman of Color by Jorgelina Corbatta

Essays

One afternoon, several years into my tenure at Wayne State University, I got a phone call during my office hours from a journalism student who wanted to meet with me. When I asked her what it was about, she explained that one of my colleagues from the English department had given her my name because she thought it could be interesting to interview me, as “a woman of color,” about my experience at Wayne. When I heard that, I thought, A woman of color? Is she talking about me, or has she confused me with someone else?

It’s History by Kyrie Mason

Essays

All of us are regularly asked to engage with the past in some way. The world is saturated by history. But, then, a simple question: What is history? Ask fifty people and you’ll get, typically, fifty shades of the same answer: History is something about a past. Whether as myth or memory, narrative or science, or found in gradients in between each, the most common denominator is a starting place in an ambiguous past, a “before now,” which is given meaning only insofar as it is connected to other things either similarly before now or, sometimes even more strangely, to things happening “now” or “later.”