Letter from the Editor

I am writing this letter from southern France, where I have been extremely fortunate to have been granted a stay at an artist’s residency. People have complex feelings about such places. For some, they are out of reach due to caregiving or financial circumstances. (This is my first residency in well over a decade for similar reasons.) For others, they are extraneous. To paraphrase a writer I admire: If I can’t sit at my kitchen table and write my book, what business do I have even calling myself a writer? But then I also think about Alain de Botton, who wrote, “Journeys are the midwives of thought.” Travel, whether local or abroad, does what good art does: it defamiliarizes, forces my thinking and imagination to expand and let in new details, new ideas, new sensations. 

Our work from this issue defamiliarizes and disorients in the best ways. In E.P. Tuazon’s “Jackie Chan Adventures,” the protagonist’s sister shares a name with a global icon and subverts her sibling’s every expectation of her. In “Astronomy: 1979,” Joey Damiano recounts a childhood dinner at a restaurant at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, where thoughts of an astronomy book collide in profound ways with his family dynamic. Among our poems, you will find tarot cards, the infamous Winchester Mystery House, the crucified body of Christ, and a writing mentor, all of whom shapeshift into deeper, stranger things over the course of a single poem. These pieces have altered the objects, people, and places they refer to in my mind indelibly. I wish you all a summer—and a lifetime—of such expansive transformations.

Colleen Abel, July 2025