Editors' Letter
A note from your friends.
Heyyyyyy,
Welcome to The Friend Quarterly, a newsletter of essays, poems, notes, recs, and other stuff tbd, all from your friendly neighborhood friends. Who we are: two writers in Brooklyn, hailing from corn-fed America in Aamina’s case (Indiana), and corn-from-a-jar-fed America in Claire’s (East Tennessee). Claire’s sister Marianne once called us the Simon and Garfunkel of East Williamsburg, take it or take it.
Aamina came up with the idea to start the newsletter as a home for conversational writing without someone else’s rules, words that don’t have to impress people they don’t give a shit about. Claire loved the idea, especially as a vehicle to learn to take herself less seriously. The goal is something that feels intimate, inquisitive, and sincere — especially in a corporate media landscape rife with suppression and conflicts of interest. (Also, we’d love to be writing more than we do and it’s easier with a friend.)
What The Friend Quarterly is: ideas to chew on, to argue about in group messages, to fall in love with.
What The Friend Quarterly is not: search engine optimized, greedy.
But we make no real promises; we’re just figuring shit out as we go. As far as our immediate intentions, we’re thinking a lot about consumption (both of material goods and media), censorship, friendship, the roles we play in our own destruction and the roles we might imagine ourselves to play in our rebuilding, if we take the chance to envision them.
We like the word friend. Beyond the people we invite to dinner parties, a friend is a collaborator, an ally, a conspirator. Simply, it’s someone who’s on your team.
Your Friends,
Aamina and Claire
P.S. This won’t be a quarterly cadence we just liked the word.
Aamina I. Khan is a multidisciplinary artist hailing from the great state of Indiana whose heart is incredibly big and whose imagination is generous and unending. A painter, a songwriter, a soon-to-be novelist, a journalist, Khan infuses their work with sincerity, real scary joyous feelings, and a wisdom that is unafraid to still be learning itself. It’s as much a pleasure to be hated by them as it is to be adored.
P. Claire Dodson is a poet, writer, and editor from Dolly Parton’s Tennessee. She loves to joke that the P. stands for pretentious, but local fans of Dodson know her for her sincere and sentimental command of the written word. Dodson’s work spans across dives into the stan psyche to meditations on grief and identity. Dodson’s voice is both evocative and gentle, both sober and childlike.