Truth and Beauty: An Invitation from Root Quarterly

A letter launching The RQ Review from Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Heather Shayne Blakeslee

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“Glorious… This is our better angels, and we owe it to ourselves, and all of us—and our future—to engage with art, and with science, with truth and with beauty, with honor, and without division.” — Heather Heying, evolutionary biologist and DarkHorse podcaster, on Root Quarterly

“A New Yorker for Philadelphia?” —Billy Penn

“A joy to leaf through—and read.” — Library Journal

“If two people always agree, one of them isn’t thinking.” — Bonnie Blakeslee, my mother, on how to be a human

As I write this to you in the summer of 2020, America is in the throes of some major realizations. About the true costs of not offering equal opportunity to all who want to thrive here, of the politicization of absolutely everything—including the response to a global pandemic—as well as years of allowing corporations to pull the strings on policy. And we’ve let some of those corporations have access to every last shred of data about us, feeding the threat of surveillance capitalism. Even our election process is threatened. This is a time of social unrest due to systemic racism, our growing class divides, and the disaffection of people everywhere who feel they are lost under the wheels of what feels like progress to others.   

These are strange times, indeed. Revolutionary, even, and I find myself in the position, out of a tiny home in a quiet neighborhood in one of America’s most interesting and vibrant cities, of issuing an invitation to you to join us in keeping the revolutionary and indomitable spirit of Philadelphia and America alive and well. 

With this letter, I invite you to join the Root Quarterly community, and to follow us online through our new enterprise: The RQ Review. We’ve interrogated many issues in the pages of our print magazine: What does it mean to have lost your way in your life? What does grace mean to you? In what ways are we manipulated by our media? Must our identity be centered on our race only—especially if one is adopted and does not know one’s history, and in any case, if people will see us how they will? What does it mean to be an artist, mother, and entrepreneur? Do the stories we tell ourselves about our trauma affect our well-being? Can we entirely change careers and deal with adult bullying at 60? What does it mean to be a successful professional but to not be able to share your chronic pain with others as you suffer? What do we lose when we cancel art or artists? What is the hell of being a midwife who has undergone multiple miscarriages? What does resilience mean to a person recovered from addiction? What kind of country do we want to live in? 

You’ll have access to a selection of these past articles in The RQ Review, which we launch today. It will be the online arm of an otherwise avowedly offline enterprise. We’ll share both a selection of our past articles from the print magazine, which our subscribers will always have first, as well as online-only content. As we said when we launched, we’ll use social media, but we won’t let social media use us. 

Though we’re living in incredibly difficult times and face an uncertain future, I have never been more sure about my decision to launch Root Quarterly in 2019 as an independent journal of art and ideas. It’s a concern that encourages people to think more deeply about complicated issues, about their values, about their city and country, and about our shared humanity. 

RQ was the culmination of a decade of mulling and two years of formal conversations at pre-RQ salons with friends—with colleagues of friends, with family, with strangers—about what worried and inspired them. I was personally alarmed over the way the 2016 election sent our populace spinning into ever more polarized debate, drowning in fake news, distrustful of our media and of one another, and without either the ability or inclination to evaluate arguments on their merits. That concern has only deepened.

After two years of research, prototyping, and workshopping, a team of talented and creative individuals coalesced around a framework for Root Quarterly: to be one-part magazine, one-part collaborative art project, and one-part social experiment. Would people disconnect from the 24-news cycle, lay down their political and ideological arms, and engage in a more nuanced, thoughtful way with our world and one another?

When we launched, Billy Penn asked, “A New Yorker for Philadelphia?” Artblog echoed our call to get offline and get real. And then this spring, a year after our launch, we were named a Best New Magazine by Library Journal amid an international short list of publications. Write Now Philly also picked up on our project and wrote that we were here to “cultivate a community that challenges beliefs and opens new conversations.” We’ve heard from subscribers and collaborators in far-flung locales that RQ has expanded their view of our city, and that it “captures snippets of contemporary lives, current events, timeless sensibilities, Philadelphia spirit, and a broader scope of interest, too—poetic or idiosyncratic—then weaves them all together into a tapestry that allows room for mystery, companionship, and good old-fashioned chance.” 

Having rounded the corner into our second year, I am proud of our leap of faith—amid a great deal of negativity and gridlock in America—to celebrate beauty, marvel at and study how we think and behave as humans, and to form an intentional, opt-in community who upholds important values: good faith dialogue among people with heterodox ideas in a spirit of learning and reflection, and in sharing our complicated, challenging stories with one another as a way to better understand each other and ourselves. 

In a recent review on the DarkHorse podcast, we were heartened to hear evolutionary biologist Heather Heying tell listeners, “Whether or not you’re in Philadelphia, I want to highly recommend [Root Quarterly] as a glossy, aesthetically beautiful magazine that has art, that has poetry, that has fiction, that has cultural critique, and is just open to ideas across the board… Glorious. This is exactly what we need right now... We can do this. We can still do this. This is our better angels, and we owe it to ourselves, and all of us—and our future—to engage with art, and with science, with truth and with beauty, with honor, and without division.” 

Those accolades and observations are due to an incredible team of people who serve as poetry, fiction, and culture editors; volunteers who have helped set up distribution in shops around the city; event planners and operations professionals who have stepped up to volunteer expertise and time; donors who helped us make the giant leap into the first year; artists who have shared their work and their stories; interns who dedicate their time; and talented writers who think deeply and bravely about difficult issues. I am immensely grateful to everyone who has made this project possible. 

If you are a writer, thinker, or artist, we invite you to contribute. If you are someone who wants to bolster locally owned, independent, solutions-oriented media, your ongoing support is critical and appreciated. If you love Philadelphia or what cities full of artists, makers, and entrepreneurs mean to us, we welcome you, no matter where you live—half of our subscribers are from outside of our environs. And if you want to find out about upcoming events or other ways to participate, make sure you’ve signed up on our newsletter list, and we’ll invite you to join us when we gather, in person or online. 

I am especially grateful for what it means for a group of people to decide to have a different conversation amid pressing forces that include a creeping, Orwellian authoritarianism that uses fear to press for self-censorship rather than open dialogue and leaves an exhausted majority of Americans out of an important conversation. 

Our collaborators, contributors, and community may not always agree, but they have all signed on to have a particular kind of conversation that is absent in broader discourse. As a colleague once told a crowd at a conference that convened unions and environmentalists over common ground in Pittsburgh, “If you are comfortable with everyone in your coalition, your coalition isn’t strong enough.” As my mother once sagely told me, “If two people always agree, one of them isn’t thinking.”

You might just be a person who cares about slowing down and exploring hard questions to which we might not yet have answers. If so, we have two requests: First, please forward this invitation to your most thoughtful friends, contrarians, and art lovers. And please, join us as a subscriber and supporter. It’s how we’ll keep offering refuge to truth and beauty seekers everywhere in America and beyond. 

With Appreciation,

Heather Shayne Blakeslee
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief
Root Quarterly // Art & Ideas from Philadelphia

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