Volume 1, Issue 12 (2026)

Dear Reader,

The journey for this semester's magazine has been a whirlwind, in a good way. It's been swift, lively, and instinctive, all while venturing toward…the taboo. We believe we speak for everyone on our production team when we say this semester flew by. However, all the tedious processes, like magazine research, theme brainstorming, and layout design, were enjoyable. But, it's time to recognize our own inevitable taboo: change. Can you spare some? No seriously, we need more money for our budget. Just kidding! We mean the change from January to now, from unknown names to unforgettable voices, from scared to raise your hand to speaking without a second thought, from a text that says, "This is _____ from class," to "We should hang out again." Maybe this is needless to say, but that's what our issue is about after all. Before this gets too sappy and cliché, like a graduation speech, let's go back to where it started: the magazine's spontaneous theme that made our whole class turn heads. Thank you, Julia.

When we landed on the idea of "taboo," our whole class had to take a beat just to "ahh" and "ooh." It seemed as if lightning had struck in a room full of frustrated strangers who just wanted to figure out what we'd be doing over the course of the semester. The more we deliberated the idea, the more it grew, until we realized it aligned perfectly with our goal. We sought the truth, to know what was bubbling under the surface, what everyone on our campus was secretly thinking but were too scared to say out loud.

With that being said, none of this would have been possible without the help of everyone on our team. We want to give a huge thanks to our fiction, poetry, and visual arts teams for giving tremendous thought to every piece and making sure the selection we landed on fit our collective vision. To our managing editors for handling all of our submissions and for making sure everything ran smoothly, to our social media team for all of the gorgeous posts, aesthetics, and inspirations they crafted. We want to thank the print and website editors; without your help these pieces wouldn't have found their beautiful home in the Diamond Line. Finally, we want to extend our utmost gratitude to Dr. Bryan Hurt, who guided us throughout the entire semester. As a group of first-timers, he led us to success every single day, helping in ways we didn't even know possible, all while making sure we had total creative control of our vision for the magazine.

For our most important thank you, we want to speak to you, the reader. We thank you for picking up the magazine and bravely diving into our world of taboo. If you're an undergraduate student here at UARK, we encourage you to submit your work to (or join the team of!) the next magazine. With that—drumroll please—we are proud to present to you the 12th issue of our literary magazine: The Diamond Line (Taboo Edition).