Dear Reader, by The Editors
Photo by Roberto Catarinicchia on Unsplash
Long ago, a curious someone dipped a pastry into his tea. The smell brought about a rush of joy—a joy he hadn’t realized still belonged to him. To commemorate the experience, he coined the term “involuntary memory,” otherwise known as the Proust Effect.
Smell is one of the strongest, most evocative of our senses, but too often it’s overlooked in our writing. For this special issue of Barrelhouse, we asked you to do your part to remedy that. To follow your noses, and report back on all the scents of the world, of your memories, of your day-to-day experiences.
In response, you delivered an olfactory smorgasbord. You took us into your parents’ kitchen, your grandpa’s couch, a high school science classroom, a gay nightclub, an emergency room, and even more delightfully (disgustingly?) smelly places.
We have curated this issue of Barrelhouse in an attempt to pay homage to smells: the good, the bad, and the hold-your-nose awful. Though while scent was the jumping-off point for these stories, poems, and essays, it was a starting place, not an end in itself. The pieces we ultimately selected do what great writing always does, illuminating what it means to be alive on this planet, in this moment, in all its wonderful (and smelly!) complexities.
With the invaluable supervision of our editor, teacher, and literary chaperone, Mike Ingram, we read more than 500 submissions over the course of a semester, whittling down our selections with lots of impassioned arguments that passersby on the 11th floor of Mazur Hall may very well have overheard, and wondered about. Rumor has it some of us are still debating the efficacies of toe cheese and what “punk” really is.
We hope you enjoy this issue. But we also hope you feel a little gross! We hope you laugh, cry, cringe, and take a shower after.
Aromatically yours,
The students in Mike Ingram’s fall 2023 Writers at Work class at Temple University
Syd Bladen, Trager Bos, Andrew Castro, Matt Cohn, Paul Dobry, Jenny Galkin, Holland Gaudelli, Sean Renaud, Isaac Kim, Henry Koonce, Tiffany Li, Brandi Maddrey, Mitch Marti, Tim Martin, Brett Myszkowski, Katina Rollins, Hannah Salerno, Kylie Sokoloff, Devon Stoots, Emily Suranie, Aalana Vasquez, Carly Whiton