Letter from the Editors

Red light and green light. Our sense of urgency; the cost of living; what it means for something, or someone, "to return" has fundamentally shifted. And life continues to do so, during the pandemic, for us and for our students. As editors/teachers at the end of the semester, we are worn down, too. We are a little older, a little more settled, a little more put together. We see some of what our students go through every day. Just to be a college student, with everything going on in the world, is astonishing.

So it is with deep admiration and affection that we present the work of Santa Barbara City College's Creative Writing magazine, Open Fruit Issue 3: "Everyone is Here". It's inspiring, inclusive, very personal and emotional. There are piano sonatas, lessons drawn in sharpie, stories about the ocean, a girl made of tape, poetry about TV. There's a lot of opening of ears and sharing what's inside. To see students reaching out through words, to each other during the pandemic is profound.

The theme, "Everyone is Here," really situated us as we tried planning it last semester. It seemed to allow collective voices--Poetry, Fiction, Non-fiction--to come together and really be heard. The phrase itself actually comes from Super Smash Brothers, a popular videogame series that recently released the "Ultimate" version that has been, literally, decades in the making. Everyone is Here was primarily used in marketing campaigns in Japan, where the videogame publisher Nintendo is based. "Everyone is here" cropped up, here and there, among the zillons of posts and comment sections in the West. We simply copy and pasted it--we being fans of punk zines (zine is short for magazine), which have loosely circulated in and around Cali since before Raymond Pettibon illustrated for SST Records, and are something of a regional and cultural tradition.

There is an intensity of the art in this issue. And there's also a lot of care. The artists are really speaking to each other, creating a community, a community of humans that need each other. That the artists don't know each other not only shows the importance, but the necessity of being here. The idea that everyone is here has meaning that is really reflective of our time, not just culturally, but in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic. We want to be touched, seen, heard, read.

This issue came together thanks to efforts of many individuals. Thanks to our student editors Jose Gomez and Shaeley Hicks (Congrats on getting into Berkeley!), Dan Yanez and Jeffrey Hattanda of Duplicating, Rachel Johnson and Alessandra Rigonati of the SBCC Foundation, and the English Department for all their support!

We hope you enjoy this issue.

Sincerely,

Joshua Escobar, Emma Trelles, Melinda Gándara, Shaeley Hicks, Jose Gomez

Issue 3 Editors