Editors’ Note - Issue II

Trisha Khattar | Vivien Song | Angela Chen | Claire McNerney

Dear readers,

As the summer following a truly unprecedented school year begins, the Lighthouse editorial team invites you to peruse through our second issue: a reflection of love, pain, and deep introspection masterfully woven into strokes of a brush and flourishes of ink. As a collection of works from Amador Valley and Foothill high schools, we hope the Lighthouse highlights the range of student expression, creativity, and diversity in Pleasanton.

These days, our world seems an increment brighter than the week before, but even as we begin returning to normal, it is critical that we continue to cherish each other’s shared humanity. Selecting works for this issue, we wanted to be fully present in the experiences and stories that ground us, to look toward the language of community.

To that end, the works in this issue are unafraid to be vulnerable and imaginative. Tho Nguyen’s poem “how to feel mortal again” offers a glimpse into the boundary between loneliness and light that exists in every love song. Megha Ramkumar’s poem “In the Waves of Space” brings us a step closer to the celestial, interrogating it with radical wit. On the prose side, Negar Morshedian’s “Quiet Anger” is both wreckage and reckoning, battle hymn and open wound.

Similarly, the artists of this issue have imbued their pieces with meaning. While Auguste McDaniel’s “A Skeleton Knows” hauntingly depicts wisdom, Simone Pereira’s “mountain tops, wise conversation” embodies adventure and the joy of finding new worlds. From the desperation in Afreen Shameem’s “Endangered” to the philosophical depth in Amy Gerstenberger’s “Absurdity,” these works—for both writing and art—hope to incite, to move, and most of all, to touch. We hope that you are as touched by these pieces as we were. 

We welcome you to find your way home through the works in this issue, just as sailors navigated through rough seas to safety with only a lighthouse to guide their way. Find comfort in the turbulence. Enter Issue II.