Editor’s Note
BY PETER LABERGE
FOUNDER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Dear Reader,
When I was fourteen years old, I ran for student council.
I was deeply shy, hopelessly brined in my own shell after years of unrelenting middle school bullying, but I was also hopeful. Running for student council was a rare moment of proactivity in my life up until that point, an attempt to run from the sense of self that I’d let the world jam into my body.
As I ran for student council, I ran from nights filled with binge-watched, bootlegged shows on YouTube. I ran from nights spent swimming through the night-spun oceans of textbooks, eager to drift into a lighthouse beam that could reveal the meaning of my future. I would’ve even settled for a suggestion. But until that election day, in the choir room where the whole grade gathered, the sweat of anticipation humming notes into our palms—any lighthouses I did come across were out-of-order. The words that bundled to form their thick, pebbled faces only cast enough light to faintly illuminate themselves, sometimes a streak or two of wind-whipped caution tape, the choppy slap of a wave on rocks.
I’m afraid this story doesn’t end the way you think it might. I didn’t realize that candidates could vote for themselves, and so I voted for another candidate—let’s call her Madison, because that was her name. Madison beat me by one vote. In retrospect, I’m grateful that I could help kickstart Madison’s civil service career, even if the frustrating so-closeness stung the underside of my tongue like salt.
But most of all, I’m grateful because three months later, when I found out a poem of mine was selected for publication by my high school’s literary magazine, Penumbra—when I finally found a working lighthouse and clung to the light for dear life—I was able to attend their staff meetings. Which were, you guessed it, the same time each week as student council.
But even more than that, I was grateful to finally envision a future doing something. I was given the gift of a light to shine where I pleased, to create focus in my life and focus in my future.
Perhaps the rest of this story is more predictable, given hindsight—I wrote my way through high school like there had been no tomorrow. I began on the Penumbra staff and ultimately served as a co-editor the following two years. I rowed and rowed my little boat—I had a boat now, gone were the days of swimming! I wasn’t exactly sure where I was going, or—to be fair—what I was even doing, but I rowed to ports inside myself I didn’t know existed. I built up confidence with each journey, each yes from a publication or award. And, of course, I started The Adroit Journal.
It’s dazzling—and bizarre—to reconcile the fact that I’ve run Adroit for half my life now. As I close in on thirty (yikes!), I reflect on the past fifteen years and teem with gratitude. First of all, I get to do something incredibly cool for work—whether I’m helping manage administration for the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program and the Inkling Program, which I founded in 2013 & 2023 (respectively) to support young writers from around the world, or working directly with students pursuing creative writing or college advising through my tutoring and college advising company, Ellipsis. I get to scour the unlit waters and hand out flashlights to students who (like me, once upon a time) were bursting with excitement about writing but unsure of their direction.
There is an endless list of people to thank for their support. Ms. Elizabeth F. Cleary, who helped me navigate the waters in those early days and offered to share her boat. A whole issue of the kindest poets in the world, who offered unpublished poems to a fifteen-year-old editor-in-chief-in-training who didn’t even have a website for his publication—among them Dorianne Laux, who has been such a giving source of light for all these years. My close high school friends—Caroline, Victoria, Julia, Olivia, and many others—who supported my writing even with varying degrees of passion for poetry themselves. Friends from outside of high school who rowed over to my boat—Amanda Silberling, Talin Tahajian, Alexa Derman, Yasmin Belkhyr, and more. My parents, who—bless—still don’t really understand poetry, but understand that their poet has to do his thing.
And Margaret Funkhouser and Joshua Rivkin, who helped me till and sow my early poems at summer programs. Jamie-Lee Josselyn, who shepherded me to Philadelphia to study at Penn. Gregory Djanikian, Beth Kephart, Jessica Lowenthal, and Al Filreis, who filled my years at Penn with poetic epiphany and provided the mentorship, support, and space that Adroit needed as I worked to scale it. Sarah Rose Etter, Hema Padhu, Dave Koslow, Doug Powell, Anthony Veasna So, and Randall Mann (who’s serendipitously in this issue!), who steered me through the ravenous and dizzying San Francisco tech world without letting my poetic spark extinguish, even when I thought it had. Deborah Landau, Catherine Barnett, Matthew Rohrer, and Ocean Vuong, who led me home.
And—here it comes—more than a thousand Adroit contributors. Nearly 500 writers who have, at one time or another, served on the staff of The Adroit Journal. A leadership team—Heidi Seaborn, Chris Crowder, David Roderick, Kalpana Negi, John Allen Taylor, Hantian Zhang, Sonia Hamer, Joanna Glum—that truly makes the world go round. Our extraordinary Poetry, Prose and Art Editors that help champion the luminary voices we platform. More enthusiastic readers than I could ever conceptually process.
In the early days, I powered this publication with trepidation and fear—a 2010-era Wix site (shudder!) I didn’t even tell my family or English teacher about it until it already had a year under its belt. (I was that certain it wouldn’t take off.) And now, here we are. A fiftieth issue, appropriately celebrating—as all our issues do—established, shining voices and emerging voices ready to shine.
Whether you are just climbing aboard or you yourself remember that sweaty Election Day in the choir room all those years ago, thank you for reading. Thank you for continuing to read. And anchors away!
Peter LaBerge
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
(P.S. Speaking of election day, if you are a U.S. citizen, please register to vote!)