Teach us how to say goodbye

Our time in the Quiddity Cinematic Universe (QCU) has come to an end. 

And what a wild ride it’s been! We took you to Shiz. We took you to Panem. We joked about our previous EIC being a cannibal, and he still let us take over the magazine. Talk about a leap of faith!

In all seriousness (or at least some seriousness) though, it’s difficult to describe how much Quiddity has meant to us. We’ve both been involved since taking Editing and Publishing the Small Literary Magazine in Spring 2022; over our time on campus, we’ve watched the evolution of the magazine — from Quipstick to Works in Translation and a page for Creative Writing Capstones — and bid fond farewells to several invaluable members of our staff. We miss them, but we know they’re now in a Better Place. 

And now, it’s our turn.

These are all things we totally thought of saying for our Impactful Last Words

We’re thrilled to report, though, that even as we become official “Friends on the Other Side,” we’re leaving Quiddity in a set of wonderful hands. Olive Hannigan has spent the past year on the staff, and we’ve been consistently impressed with her patience, insight, and dedication to all the nitty-gritty work of running a magazine. Where we screamed our opinions on poetry across a room, Olive stated hers with cool confidence. Where we smashed laptops in our feud over fiction, Olive practiced insightful rhetorical techniques to sway us all to her point of view. Where we threw chairs to knock out a few other staffers’ teeth, Olive put her hands on their shoulders, encouraged them to take a deep breath, and then yanked those teeth out with her bare hands. We have so much confidence in where she’ll take this lit mag. 

We’ve always written like we’re running out of time, but since now we really are, we also need to take one final moment to express our insane level of gratitude for Quiddity’s faculty advisor, Daniel Pieczkolon. We’ve been certifiable Daniel Fanboys and Fangirls for all of our time as undergrads; it’s absolutely no exaggeration to say that neither we nor Quiddity would be the same without him. Not only has Daniel guided us through multiple classes, re-ignited our passion for poetry, and put up with an ever-increasing level of hi-jinks and shenanigans, but he’s very much the unsung hero behind so much of what makes Quiddity Quiddity — a warm, thoughtful, wry presence that definitely made our decision to stay on the staff an easy one. He may be notoriously humble, but we’re not throwing away our shot to give him the extraordinary shout-out he deserves. 

Tomorrow there’ll be more of us! 

Ryland McGinniss and Julianna Reidell (Proud Members of the Daniel Army)