About
First published in 1923, The Loom is the student-run arts and literary magazine at Loomis Chaffee. We publish a collection of student work twice a year, including all forms of 2-D art, poetry, and creative writing. When students are not working on the biannual publications, The Loom hosts biweekly Prose & Poetry creative writing workshops and serves as a literary society and club on campus. This fall, our theme is Memory & Mind.
Art by Julie Kang '23
"What will we remember of these past few years with all their confusion and noise? Few live, as we do at the Island, under a compulsion to make sense of all they experience—to render one’s adolescence a coherent narrative bent toward some end we can only dimly imagine.
The ancient Greeks, at the dawn of literacy and document, understood the problem of memory all too well. In some sources, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, presides over the river Lethe and bids the spirits of the dead to drink the waters that would purge them of their memories in preparation for their eventual reincarnation. Memory, then, is the obstacle to one’s perpetual renewal, but also the only means by which the spirit retains its understanding of itself, as a self.
We invite you to consider these meditations on Memory as explorations of the processes by which incident becomes identity and how an age that has lost faith in the promises of reincarnation makes sense of history to navigate the fragility and transience of life."
—Sangyeop Kim, Faculty Advisor