EDITORIAL MENTORSHIP 

Mentorship Recipient
Recurring Apart-ment

Recipient Reflection: 
Megan Hanlon

On "Recurring Apart-ment" by Megan Hanlon

by ​​Jason Harris

From the moment I read Megan’s essay – Recurring Apart-ment – to our first time speaking over Google Meet to the back-and-forth thread of emails exchanged, I knew that I was working with a writer who I could trust, with a writer who understood her vision and stayed true to it. It is writers like this who remind me why I love what I do as an editor. Working with Megan felt natural. 

First, I was drawn to the speaker in Recurring Apart-ment because she is honest, she is brave, she is tired. This speaker is a speaker who loves mothering but also loves autonomy; who also loves a space to call her own. The fragmented nature of Recurring Apart-ment drew me in second. In the first section, I was dropped into the most intimate of scenes a speaker can share: their dreamscapes. Dreamscapes: those liminal spaces between life and death. Through these dreamscapes I learned what dreaming meant to our speaker – freedom. Dreaming as freedom. Dreaming as a place to put down the mental load. Dreaming as a place where the mental load doesn’t exist. Dreaming as a place to reclaim one’s autonomy, one’s being as a being in this world and not as care-taker. 

Gaston Bachelard, in his book Poetics of Space, wrote that “the house allows one to dream in peace – “ but what happens to that peace when there are children to raise? When there is a spouse to care for? When there is a home to maintain? When the mental load of home and societal expectations never stop expanding? These questions were answered for me after reading Megan Hanlon’s essay Recurring Apart-ment.
​

Jason Harris is an editor, teaching artist, and writer. He currently serves as the Poetry Editor for Gordon Square Review. He has received fellowships from The Watering Hole and Twelve Literary Arts. To read more of his work, you may visit his website: https://jasonharriswriter.com/. His Twitter handle is @ecopoems.​