Sink or Swim

ROSE KENNEDY

Welcome to Sink or Swim—the 20th issue of The Quarry, MQ's journal of student writing. So, to sink or to swim? For four short months, this was the theme that rested on the big-fish small-pond shoulders of third year creative writing students. Raising more questions than answers, our cohort tiptoed along the fine line of what makes us, and what breaks us. Inside this issue are stories that caress danger, wring joy, and bleed happy endings: this year, we sank in order to swim, sinking fingers and claws, hearts and life-vests into cold and turbulent waters to return to the surface with treasures.

For instance, Jacinta Tabbiche's sea-bound short story ‘Survival or Solicitude’ slow- dances between the literal and spiritual—iceberg or Titanic? Joshua Coulter’s mystical short story ‘Repercussions’ asks what it means to be our own ends, and flirts with the afterlife of decisions. Reader, dip your toe in the bathwater, with the micro-fictions of Thomas Sinclair, who takes us into a tiny, indulgent world of small and pointy lyricism, and bite sized sentences demanding oceans of thought in his series ‘Little People Sink’. Feel the tides of age as Samara Jennings delicately re-flowers the pain and hope of childhood in her trio of poems.

Then, if you dare, plunge into the salty depths of generational hindsight in Andra Abreu’s ‘Float’. Furnish your soul with Olivia Todorovitch's elegant and unflinching short story, ‘The Inheritance of a Crown’, while Dasha Valle explores the inky seas of sorrow and liberation in her poems, ‘The Way the Ink Blots the Page’.

We could not have compiled our issue without Dr Michelle Hamadache. We thank you for always making our drop in the ocean feel like a tidal wave :-)

A message in a bottle, an odyssey in a tea-cup, a wave on a wine-dark sea, dear reader, the latest issue of The Quarry awaits you.

What will you do?

Sink, or swim?