Intelligence - Inspiration - Connection - Humor. Look Closer: Mission Statement from the Editor: This is a one-woman show for now. I am seeking submissions, editors, and returning guests. Guest Room Journal publishes tasteful, intelligent commentary, inspiring personal essays, interviews, humor, photography, art, and high-quality poetry. During a time when inspiration, rational thought, and connection is needed most, the Guest Room is a space for well-crafted content that's healthy for its readers professionally, emotionally, and intellectually. Guests include new and returning contributors with pieces perpetuating only our best human traits: ingenuity, humor, and resiliency. Social distancing means many rely on "social" media for information and contact, but the current business model perpetuates our worst human tendencies. The platform permeates our culture with toxic tribalism, outrage, extremism, and misinformation. This journal exists in reaction to that toxicity by returning to a more old-school way of sharing. We can move closer to becoming our best selves, whatever that looks like for each of us in this moment. Guests share universal fears, hopes, and joys unique to no one constructed "category" within which we've confined ourselves. There is more beauty around us than we see, even now in this unprecedented time of COVID-19. There's more around us than we see. I hope the Guests inspire readers to stop. Be still. Breathe. Look up from their phone. Look out, to one another and themselves. And then.....look closer.