Welcome to Rail Switch
poetry videos / short-form narrative
You can find the latest issue below!
Issue 3
Poems
Fiction
Timeshare Bath
A man whose bathtub is rented to him on a timeshare basis goes looking for a better apartment
Editor's Statement
At the inception of this project, we thought a lot about the fact that combining poems and video could be additive in both directions: it could help poetry live up to our ideal for it, of being emotionally and aesthetically engaging from one moment to the next, and it could remind us to ask of films that they make every shot count. In developing Rail Switch, we were able to move beyond our ideals, into a felt sense of how rewarding it is to seek out emotionally enriching poems, and at the same time our appreciation of the complexity of filmmaking evolved. In addition to discovering innovative productions by multimedia artists, we became interested in encouraging filmmakers to draw on the rich history of poetry, and apply their unique talents to creating new adaptations, and between this issue and the previous one, we became set up to facilitate those works. Also in this issue, you can find our first narrative short: Timeshare Bath, which is both a narrative extension of a poetry video that was released in the last issue, and an adaptation of a short story which was based on the poem that that video was based on. In adding fiction to our repertoire, we also hope to clarify a broad question that motivates this stage of the project: what does a magazine look like in the digital age?
Acknowledgements
As you will see in the credits of these videos, we have a lot of thanks to give across various institutions and individuals at Wesleyan University: thank you to the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, and to the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism for their generous support, and to Merve Emre, the director of the Shapiro Center, for her advice and advocacy. Thank you as well to the creative community of Wesleyan who shaped this project in both concrete and ineffable ways, and to the artists who found their way to us from across the world, and contributed work.
