Editor’s Note: Flaw and Favor
Some articulated remains of Neanderthals demonstrate detailed pathologies, debilitation, numerous dramatic hunting injuries—so much brokenness it is difficult to imagine these individuals contributing to the survival of their group. Their physical flaws and breakages highlight Neanderthal compassion, consistency, and medical skill. Flaw and Favor are not opposite characteristics or conditions; often they depend upon one another.
Character flaws fuel a narrative—the hidden horrors, the blind spots, the insecurities that goad us on. The crack in everything where the light gets in, which the favored singer and flawed human Leonard Cohen illuminated with his ethereal growl.
We are grateful to our contributors for their expansive conversation, beginning with Rana AlSheikh’s visual poetry, which uses “imagery to trace the quieter parts of emotion,” focusing on resiliency, communal health, the environment, and individual experience. Sometimes struggles with angels and heavenly spirits cause injury, such as Jacob’s displaced hip and life-long limp; or, in this issue, clairaudience manifesting as tinnitus in Brittany Brewer’s “I have been to three psychics.” Sometimes flaw and favor combine into their own distinctive flavor, as in Claudia Monpere’s micro “Word Palate”. In these pages, you’ll find blinding, burning anger, talons and jaw bones; you’ll find exquisite tenderness in a bag of dollar store groceries; the history of wheat; translations from Chinese, Spanish, and Hebrew, all bearing witness to our flawed selves, our flawed earth, and the reparative imagination.
We are grateful to our unreasonably generous and talented guest editors. Flower Conroy and Alex M. Frankel edited poetry; Mandira Pattnaik edited fiction; Noam Dorr read creative nonfiction. We were delighted to have Taylor Johnston-Levy join the permanent Ilanot staff as fiction editor. And we are grateful to you readers—we could not do this without you!
—Marcela Sulak, managing editor
October, 2025
Table of Contents for Flaw and Favor