Introduction to Fall 2024 Issue: “Return to the Era of a Mad King”

Welcome dear readers and residents of the North Meridian to our annual fall issue. This year marks our fifth year of publishing. Since our inception, we have grown to not only publish our annual issue of the journal but to also publish occasional special issues and a host of books. As such, this year we have switched from being merely the North Meridian Review: A Journal of Culture and Scholarship and are now operating under the title North Meridian Press. We have published eight titles of translation, poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction and are in the process of publishing half a dozen more titles in the coming year.

This year also marked big accomplishments for the press with Danielle Coffyn’s poem “If Adam Picked the Apple” winning a Puschart Award, as well as poetry editor Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo’s novel placing as a semifinalist in the annual BookLife Prize. Of course, we do not write or publish for the sake of awards, but the recognition is appreciated and speaks to the high quality of our contributors and editors.

This year, too, has been one of social and political turmoil. The election of 2024 followed a rollercoaster of events with presidents stepping down, last-minute historic campaigns being launched, and only the second time in US history for a former president to win a non-consecutive term as the chief executive.

Like many, I worry what the return of Trump means both for the United States and the world broadly. It is increasingly obvious that many of the world’s governments are in the midst of a prolonged rightward political lurch where immigrants, people of color, women, LGBTQ people, academia, and an independent press are vilified for the sake of amassing power in the hands of a few. The “working class” (really a moniker for rural white people) are supposedly championed, but the economic policies pursued by these right-wing demagogues leave them in more precarious situations than before. This criticism is not an implicit endorsement of the Democratic Party. The past four years of President Joe Biden have been disastrous on a number of fronts, most notably with the Israeli war in Palestine and Lebanon. For the final year of his presidency, Biden gave the Israeli government uncritical support to pursue ethnic cleansing and genocide in their decades-long mission of land grab from native inhabitants. The result has been a massive humanitarian crisis. Biden will, if just retellings of this period persist, be remembered forever as one of the butchers of the Palestinian people. Combine this with Biden’s lack of interest in student loan forgiveness and easing the price gouging of corporations, and it is not difficult to understand how just four years after the disaster of Trump and COVID-19, enough American voters abandoned the presidential progressive coalition. We are all now suffering because of these Biden failures.

These failures were felt, perhaps, most closely for Americans with the widespread crackdown on Palestinian students, their allies, and faculty who alarmed by pro-Zionist college administrators protested in the final months of the Spring 2024 academic term. The protests were simple enough. They demanded that educational institutions join the BDS movement and boycott Israel for its continuation of genocide and apartheid. Far too many college administrators, most notoriously at Columbia University, responded by using police forces to harass and attack students and faculty. The irony that this occurred just a few years after the non-stop chatter of “free speech” on campuses was not lost on people. We are currently in the midst of a situation that sees calls for freedom of speech for fascists but violence against Arab and Muslim Americans and their allies.

The pro-Zionist backlash was felt even here, at my campus, when a former student made a report to the administration about my work at the press in opposing the actions of the Israeli and American government. Alarming and disappointing as this all is, it is not surprising and serves as a clarion call to continue our work.

This past semester and summer I was fortunate enough to do a series of trips ranging from Indianapolis to Rome to Johannesburg. Seeing the different locations all present a variety of opposition to the ongoing war was heartening and gives me hope in a future international order of socially just laws that prioritize the humanity of people over the land claims and sovereignty arguments of governments.

Figure 1&2: Graffiti at Indianapolis Canal Walk; Graffiti on the Campus of Sapienza University of Rome.

There was considerable irony, too, when at Duke University I visited their archives and toured one of the history exhibits they had on display. Celebrating the student movement to oppose South African apartheid, the university displayed the work and signs of the students in the 1980s. While professors and students were thrown to the ground, arrested, and tear gassed in our own time, here was a celebratory exhibit extolling the virtues of boycotting, divesting, sanctioning, and protesting apartheid governments.

Figure 3: Exhibit display at Duke University chronicling the anti-apartheid movement in the late 20th century.

We will someday be someone’s museum pieces. Alabama, from which we publish, is a divided arena in its public memory. Confederates and segregationists are celebrated alongside civil rights activists. The North Meridian Press continues to wade into this contradiction, proudly taking the side of the civil rights tradition. Five years in, we remain a humanities publication for the humane in inhumane times. May our words be an example to some, a beacon—albeit small—that even in the era of mad kings there are those who note the emperor has no clothes and state those facts plainly.

In this issue we have a new peer-reviewed scholarly article by Carmine Di Biase on the topic of Shakespeare, wood, and the process of work. We have a robust Prose section ranging in fiction, non-fiction, and creative non-fiction. BJ Bruther continues her essay project of examining the modern right-wing movements of Western Europe and the U.S., specifically focused on rhetoric. Her contribution to this issue is over the deep ideological connections of Project 2025 to earlier fascist movements. Daniel Vollaro, Kristin Mattson, Johnathan Griffith, Willie Carver, and Sarah Ratliff have new essays. Juli Mostillo and Renesha Dhanraj have two short stories. Our art section features Joseph Giri, the 2024 artist in residence for the journal, and he is joined with pieces from LaShawnda Crowe Storm, Grey Johnson, and Sean Godfrey. Our poetry editor Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo introduces this year’s section of original poems, themed around political and social poetry. In our review section readers will find a new essay from Robin Averbeck, along with reviews of academic and fiction titles. Finally, on a very sad personal note, this year saw the passing of two figures who have been important both to the press and me personally. Nancy Gabin, professor emeritus of history at Purdue, and Ken Williams, poet and folklorist, both died suddenly as we were nearing the end of this issue’s season. There are no words, of course, sufficient to describe the impact their lives had on all of us who knew them. But we hold them both, and their families, in love. We are better for having known them.

Dear reader, thank you for your continued support. Together we will advance the cause of justice, however small, forward. To being a humane publication now and always.

In Solidarity,

Wesley R. Bishop, PhD

Founding and Managing Editor

North Meridian Review

December 2024