I won’t lie; it’s been incredibly difficult to find the intense focus it takes to create an issue of The Indianapolis Review right now. I have had dark thoughts of discontinuing because of the difficulties of doing anything right now.

In addition to the constant chaos in our country, add the scourge of AI (which I have to wrangle with in my classrooms), climate change disasters, the challenge of raising teens, and the awful reality of being a woman in middle age. Finding happiness and sanity each day seems more and more difficult.

However, because of the fact that the Arts are under attack (see what’s going on with the NEA and no doubt they will come for the artists, too . . . ), my little journal must continue on.

I am not affiliated with any organization or government entity, and whatever I can do to support artists and writers, I will continue to do. And please note that our journal has had an ethics statement for a long time, wherein we pledge to promote diverse voices and are not interested in publishing racism or hate-speech, etc. It once seemed almost too obvious to even post that ethics statement.

Today, the CC where I am a professor of English and Creative Writing just announced that they are eliminating the Department of Diversity, Equity, and Belonging. And look, we all knew these things were probably coming; we’ve all been watching the slow train wreck of the last 8 years, and even further back, back to the election of our first Black president and the reality star’s reaction to that, which set him on his course. He just seems hell-bent to complete his course at this point.

We know the worst-case scenarios, and shudder to think of them, as we watch some of them playing out in front of our eyes. And I am a woman who has a Black immigrant partner and biracial children, a point that seems to be one of the very triggers for the conservative movement in this country–the fact that America’s face is changing rapidly, that Whites are moving to the minority, etc. The Whitelash, so to speak.

All that being said, I am grateful for the poetry community that I am a part of, and I am certainly relying on it right now in many ways.

I am also trying to remember that we’ve been through worse, all our ancestors have been through worse, etc. During the Red Scare of the 1950’s, apparently my paternal grandfather was on an FBI watch list. I thought of this when I saw the stories about the ‘DEI watch list’ released by an ultra conservative group which was founded for the purposes of blocking everything Biden did.

I also recently read the Polish epic, The Peasants, a classic novel set in the late 1800’s in the area of Poland my maternal side is from. As well as describing village life, it also delves into the unsettled political climate after serfdom and Poland’s struggle for independence. Reflecting on the challenges that humanity has faced, and having had grandparents who came to America for a better life in between the two World Wars, and being an American raised in a time of prosperity and the oft-touted dream of democracy, it is heartbreaking to think that we could lose that dream. We are currently watching a leader do things that are illegal day after day after day. And as the courts work to fight against these things, we know how easy it can be for laws to change. We talk about our escape plans. We talk about What-ifs.

After this inauguration, I kept hearing in my head, “today is the day I became an American.” I never felt particularly American, maybe because of my background, but I was certainly never anti-American. I have worked in many vocations that are of service to my community, and I have paid my taxes and dues. However, after the inauguration, I felt the weight of belonging to this country acutely; I felt the despair of losing faith in the people–those who feel it is perfectly fine to penalize the poor and most vulnerable, to abandon real Christian principles, to allow a billionaire full access into our bank accounts.

It feels full circle now from where my ancestors came. I might have to leave; the dream is over. Or is it? What will be?

Natalie Solmer
Editor In Chief
The Indianapolis Review

Indianapolis, Indiana
February, 2025

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