Closeness and Closure: A Parting Letter from the Editor

Gabriella Ronquillo ’26

During my first year at Bard I could feel a sense of closeness carefully cocooned in the walls, in the shared notes of Seminar, and in the conversations with references that my 9th grade self wouldn’t understand. Looking back at my freshman year, I could feel how awkward it was to decide to claim Bard as my school. That is, I couldn’t quite find my footing to pass the threshold of claiming this community as my own. I first got a peak into the implications of being a Bard student towards the end of my first Writing and Thinking in a rather jarring way. The Y2s would warn us of the terrors of annotating 100 pages a week, writing three paragraph introductions, and spending 5 hours working on a provocative clickbaity title. Not much has changed since then–as Y2s, we still heed similar warnings to freshmen. More than being warnings, these testimonies became invitations into the closeness that Bard forms. These invitations were so special because it represented a bond between 9th graders and Y2s, at opposite ends of the same chapter—Bard. It would be up to those at the same threshold I found myself on nearly 4 years ago to decide how to fill the pages.

Bard places us in a position where we all play an important role in creating a community we want to be a part of. Finding my place throughout my time at Bard was particularly challenging, as administrative changes were a constant throughout my time here. This shift began my sophomore year with the first principal change, during which many described Bard as “not the one we were promised.” During that year, I saw the Bardvark turn into an outlet for advocacy and clarity on school policy and discussion. It was then that I decided to write my high school chapter with the Bardvark (pun intended). If you were to ask what makes Bard Bard, it would be the Bardvark. This newspaper has shown me the closeness of this community in the midst of constant change. During meetings in which we would brainstorm articles with some ideas that became articles and most that didn’t, we allowed ourselves to share something very vulnerable and, might I say sacred—the pride we had for our original thinking. Through every revision and edit, I learned more about every writer and learned how to amplify their voices rather than change it. The intimacy created by writing for the Bardvark and having the courage for this work to be picked apart and read by the school community, I would argue, shaped Bard’s culture for the better.

Embracing the challenges of the writing process, with unfinished thoughts in google documents and scribbled free writes, became a fun and intellectual mindset we carry in our classes. Outside of Bard, the world may ask you to lose your spark, your jumbled, complicated pursuits of etymology, religion, and Latinx studies, and most fearfully, your devotion to the liberal arts. You can write about all of these topics and more in every Bardvark issue. Going through multiple drafts, leaning into my voice coming through my articles, the Bardvark showed me radical resistance in loving the Sisyphean yet rewarding effort of being human.

My chapter with the Bardvark is not one that actually ends. In future publications, I may not be able to replicate the closeness I grew to the Bardvark and every writer, and that’s okay. Besides, the Bardvark showed me the value in not trying to perfect but embrace the quirks of your writing, and the same goes for joining new communities—through embracing the shared nature and intimacy of the writing process, you get to shape the community you want to be in. For those who haven’t written articles this year, I hope you join the Bardvark not just for the impact it has had on me but for the opportunity it gives you to impact others. While I will be missing the fresh copies of our issues every month, I will miss the dedication and motivation that everyone brought to make the Bardvark possible. For that, I thank you all, readers and writers, for giving me my fondest memories at Bard. I hope you continue to make more in the fall.