The process of creation fails to halt at publication; instead, it flourishes after publication. Its relationship is continuously morphed by the audience. Chinese handscrolls invite viewers to leave poems, comments, and seals. Their contributions illuminate one another, but all such contributors may never meet.

From The Gardner Museum’s empty frames to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, art takes on presence beyond its intended forms: a stolen painting lives on through someone’s written recount and a visual image transformed into music. What is lost in this transformation?

Often, we overgeneralize our perceptions as universal, our tastes and practices as pervasive. Calle’s The Blind and Rilke’s Apollore reveal the limits of your experience—framing novel perspectives as individual accounts. Paradoxically, judging art or writing is an attempt at reevaluating the biases we inhabit.

For Aster, ekphrasis reflects community—one rooted in collaboration and room for interpretations. We hope that every issue continues to inspire new forms of writing, art, and every creative medium in between. In encouraging to adhere to an artistic experience, we are also encouraging you to betray it. Explore this paradox. We look forward to reading your ekphrastic translations, however visceral and transformative they may be.

My friend once told me about a workshop she attended on ekphrasis. To me, the word had simply meant seeking inspiration from a visual piece of art, another vague Greek concept mentioned in passing. However, she described to me how it was centered on more than just observation, then rumination on paintings in a museum. Ekphrasis was the creative process. How do writers inspect the world around them, then translate physical objects into a paragraph on a page, a stanza scribbled in a journal? In that aspect, everything in this world is art that inspires. 

So for me, ekphrasis is quietly sitting under a tree in the park, watching the sun pierce through newborn leaves. Or it’s opening the window on a snowy night and writing under the light of the streetlamp, as if peeling back the layers of a house can remove the formalities between you and nature. Art, whether verbal or visual, is a sign of consciousness: in order to write, we must reflect on what we see around us. Ekphrasis, then, is acknowledging that continuous cycle of introspection and inspiration. I hope that Issue 17 recognizes the creative process as much as the product. Tell us what leads you to put your pen on the paper. Tell us about that fragment of the world too beautiful for normal conversation to capture. 

Ekphrasis is perhaps one of the most difficult and the most straightforward themes we’ve presented to you. Ekphrasis is at once a description and a prompt: witness a piece of art and to respond to it in writing. By now, I’m sure you’re thinking of that age-old creative writing advice. “Show, don’t tell.” But while we are interested in vivid pieces of work, we are also interested in visceral ones. Art, no matter the medium, is an experience. The difficulty of ekphrastic work lies in maintaining the essence of that experience while copying it into writing. 

Well, perhaps “copying” is not the best word choice. To copy is to plagiarize. (And as a literary magazine, we cannot in good faith encourage plagiarism!) Maybe a better word is “translate.” Translate an artwork---an artistic experience---onto the page. And yet, this poses another challenge. To quote R.F. Kuang’s Babel, “Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”

Where does that leave us indeed? Have we given you an impossible theme? In encouraging to adhere to an artistic experience as closely as possible, we are also encouraging you to betray it. Explore this paradox. Find inspiration from the art forms around you. We look forward to reading your ekphrastic translations, however visceral and violent they may be.

Last summer, I spent a lot of time transiting on the red line into Washington D.C. I found myself spending the approximately forty minutes of commute every morning and afternoon studying the world outside the train window. The uninterrupted portrait of new growth greenery from the suburbs would begin to transition into an unbroken fence line and then a concrete bridge running alongside the rail, its surface populated with art, slogans, and tags. The concrete bridge had even become a site for political protest, with graffitiers having non-physical conversations and disputes where their spray paint would contradict and bleed over each other. 

What is so fascinating to me about this scene that I saw from my seat on the right side of the train each day, was the fact that it was a corner of resistance that walked the line between verbal and visual conversation. It was a profoundly human reaction and response to the work of one another, which remains a foundational pillar of this issue’s theme: Ekphrasis. 

Issue 17: Ekphrasis is a love letter to those of us who still visit art museums, get lost in the view from a train window, or simply struggle with the creation of art. It reminds us that in a world that has begun to downplay artistic merit through inanimate technology, we can still reserve a space for the creative spirit. In paying homage to this Ancient Greek tradition, we invite our readers to reinterpret the details, revisit the story, and reinvigorate the life found within the art that inspires you. 

I’ve been sitting on the bottom edge of October for a while now, trying off and on again to clear the last rays of Summer from my throat; it coughs up into my writing sometimes. The days are longer but the air is lazy and warm, without the autumn-rush of deadlines to meet and clocks that move forward too quickly. As summer’s lethargy bleeds into the urgency of fall, a similar shift tries to creep into my writing.

This summer, I joined Aster Lit. Even as an editor, that hurriedness and sense that I was running out of time still lingered. I was feeling the shift that many teen writers go through. Writers become so wrapped up in the modern culture that commodifies our art—the game of praying to get published and staring at the ticking clock so long that we forget to look up. That cookie-cutter anatomy of youth writing has a way of making you wonder why you create in the first place.

With this issue, we urge you to look up. Breathe it in. Out. Ekphrasis means taking a breath, clearing your throat, and starting again. Take a look around at the world like it’s new. Find art in the tiniest, most ridiculous things. Think about the colours in the changing leaves; think about art as a casual kind of love, like knowing you shouldn’t and doing it anyway. 

With Issue 17: Ekphrasis, we urge you to put it all into your writing, just because you can.

Is beauty truth? Is truth beauty? I’m sitting in a classroom among classrooms, a desk shaped like other desks, beige walls joined to beige walls and walls beige, and I’ve never been more convinced that life could be beautiful.

What I mean, really, is that I was reading John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” anthology book flipped to page 643, eyes steady on the paper as my professor implored us to ponder: how can we experience beauty? Can we take the likeness of someone else—something else, even—and turn them into words that mirror a feeling, a feeling that is as vivid as the image itself? This is what we challenge you to meditate on with Issue 17’s theme: Ekphrasis. How can you bridge the gap between lived reality and written word, and how does the written word alter that same lived reality?

I say this because words are concrete; they are steady, resin-preserved beings. But memory is not. The shades of what we experience in our day-to-day—dewy leaves in the morning, wafts of cinnamon from a baker’s pastry—are felt, lived, remembered, and then gone. It is up to us, the stockpilers of memory, to reimagine these human experiences as durable things. It is up to the painter to keep the leaves on a deciduous tree all winter long; it is up to the candlemaker to create wax that burns synthetic cinnamon from its wick; and it is now up to you, dear reader, to find the truth in something beautiful. How can something seen survive the gap from memory to page, the void between the mortal and the immortal?