Letter from the editor

Xpress Magazine
Nov 5 · 3 min read

by Amelia Williams

Editor’s note: This story is part of Issue 2, which is out on print stands at San Francisco State University now.

It’s been so long since I’ve been allowed to write in first person I’ve nearly forgot how. Feels kind of weird. Not very … journalistic.

Which is funny considering for most of my life I was writing in first person, through my own eyes and my own versions of things: beauty, pain, controversy, love. I grew up in books and diaries, typing fleeting stories in the 2003 version of Microsoft Word. I knew I wanted to be a writer when my ego was validated in a major way; my second grade teacher put a poem I wrote about dolphins in the school newsletter. I went to an arts high school for creative writing and did just that — wrote creatively and made a lot of very eloquent and beautiful things up. I could write whatever I wanted, and any of my characters could say whatever I needed to fulfill my plot points or provoke my reader.

I didn’t think I would ever become a journalist because I never felt like I was that good with strangers, with parting that intangible curtain of introduction to get people to talk to you and trust you enough to tell you things. Juicy, throbbing, put-it-in-print things, I mean. Not just anything.

I thought I was going to be a human geography major in Vancouver after a childhood in San Francisco. Obviously that didn’t happen, but I never thought I would be interviewing drag queens in the middle of the night on a Tuesday or crying with immigration lawyers in their Market Street office or going to a support group with a mother who lost her son to gun violence. Journalism has given me inspiration I never thought to look for, and a reality check I never knew I needed.

This semester has been the least amount of writing I have done in all my semesters at San Francisco State and the most reading of other people’s work I have done since high school. The mantle of EIC is a lot to bear, anyone else who’s written one of these letters can attest to that. This kind of feels like “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” if you get my reference. If you don’t — I am the latest iteration of a reincarnated being that can manipulate the elements, but in this case “the elements” are my fellow students and they produce stories, not bursts of fire or flying rocks.

My third semester as a part of Xpress Magazine brought a new wave of faces and some warmly welcomed returns. Such an eclectic group has bore eclectic stories. In these 25-odd pages of content we have a little bit of everything: environmentalism, cannabis, religious identity, cats, the music scene, penises. We have dealt with some rather unique challenges this semester, the most glaring being the utter loss of our website. Obviously that hasn’t stopped any of us from writing. I am so grateful to have such a diligent, motivated and ambitious staff to bring this next issue of Xpress into fruition. You have no idea how many phone calls with the printers I had to make. Unto us a magazine is born!

Xpress Magazine

A temporary home for San Francisco State University’s student-run magazine

Xpress Magazine

Written by

This is the temporary online home for fall 2019 stories coming from Xpress Magazine, San Francisco State University’s student-run magazine.

Xpress Magazine

A temporary home for San Francisco State University’s student-run magazine

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