Letter from the Editor

“What happens in a certain place can stain your feelings for that location, just as ink can stain a white sheet.”

—Lemony Snicket

This month’s issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room is all about places: real, imagined, and otherwise. About visiting them and being changed by them, about living in them and moving away, about coming to terms with them or learning to define new terms altogether, about finding love, or identity, or acceptance along the way.

In the pages that follow, we’ll take a rather unconventional trip across the globe, stopping off in Tokyo (Lost in Translation), London (Skyfall), New Orleans (Beasts of the Southern Wild), Texas (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), Nebraska, Connecticut (Stanley & Iris), Seattle (Singles), and Twin Peaks. We’ll take a deeper look at these places—and all the various places, internally and externally, that these places call to mind—in the hopes of seeing how they leave their marks on us, and how we change by moving through them.


—Chad Perman, Editor-in-Chief