Letter from the Editor

I am writing this in the earliest stages of 2025, which dawned with dramatic stone-colored clouds here in central Illinois. I was discharged from the hospital yesterday after a brief stay which saw me go from 2024 to 2025 inside my fourth-floor hospital room. My night nurse wore a jaunty “2025” tiara with gold glitter and when she came into my room to take vitals a little before one, she wished me a Happy New Year. 

Along with all the physical challenges of being unwell, emotional challenges make the task of healing more complicated. Not too long ago, my horoscope told me that I would have to “lean on others more than [I] would otherwise like to” and my spouse and I have continued to joke about this as we both try to daily navigate our careers, our own creative work, two neurodivergent children, keeping up a home and all the other demands of daily life. “I may need to lean on you harder than I would otherwise like to,” one of us might joke to the other the morning of a complicated day full of appointments, meetings, and errands. 

There is nothing like illness to make all of us lean. To put together this issue, I leaned harder on my staff than before, and watched as they all rose uncomplainingly to give me the help I needed to put this wonderful issue out into the world. I leaned on their patience and labor, on the generosity of their attention to our ever-expanding Submittable queue. I leaned on the makers who submitted to us, as I always do, whose work props me up no matter my circumstances. 

I’m hesitant to make proclamations about what I expect from the year ahead, or what I feel about the year just passed. It’s a sad thing to kick each year out the door telling it how terrible it was, even though globally, politically, there is no question that we are in times of escalating crises and cruelty. But, as Randall Jarrell wrote, “The ways we miss our lives are life.” I don’t want to hasten time, don’t want to romantize the year ahead, or stamp “Dumpster Fire” on the year just passed. Each day, each year, the work continues—the work of care, of art-making, of experiencing the world in all the ways it presents itself. May we all lean as we need to. 

Colleen Abel, January 2025