Editor’s Note: Fixations – Obsessions and Repair
“I can’t think of a better theme that pervades our daily lives: addictive phone scrolling, social media, the latest fads, but obsessions can bring about solutions, how to repair a broken faucet, how to heal a heartbreak,” says guest prose editor Christine H. Chen. Guest poetry editor Athena Kildegaard tells us: “Most days I read the news with my morning coffee: fire, shooting, hostages, fawning dictators, the whole catastrophe day in and day out. What a delight and reprieve, then, it was to turn to the submissions for this issue, to lay my ear against the reverberating chambers of poems sent from many places by many makers.”
I am particularly moved by Sara Eliza Johnson’s long-form prose piece on her long reading of the poet May Swenson, in which Johnson solves a mystery she didn’t realize had been haunting her (and perhaps May Swenson) for decades. When I first heard Sara Eliza Johnson read a version of this essay at AWP, I knew I wanted to read it again and again.
We have always believed that good writing is most often born of a particular time and place; but that regardless of genre or style, in its essence it “breaks down…concepts into sensuous qualities,” as guest poetry editor Adam Day notes. “When well crafted, writing related to fixation can manifest in powerful themes, surprising phrases, and an admirable attachment to a specific topic.”
Maybe one way of putting it is that in its particularity, the writing we value most moves into a sphere of hyperconnectivity, where each story, poem, flash piece, touches a reader profoundly in a sphere they perhaps have never visited. But these pieces also create community among readers: “I don’t know Adam Day, my fellow guest editor, from Adam, as they say,” notes Athena Kildegaard, “but it amazed me how often—most of the time—we fell for the same poems. I’m not saying this was easy. We had to turn down work by beloved poets, but being in the presence of the poems we share with you here, this was a balm, a healing. May it be so for you, too.” Christine H. Chen’s editorial strategy yielded “stories reflect the multi-faceted ways of repairs in the face of illness, how we mend grief, how we protect our children from the realities of war, how we can be silly and quirky in our restoration.”
We are writing and reading from a broken world. The world is broken, in part, because of obsession thought patterns and habits that are difficult to break; destructive appetites that are difficult to extinguish. But perhaps it is breaking as an egg breaks, to allow a new and radiant creature to be born. We hope that the small but powerful pieces here create movement to healing and joyful repair.
Marcela Sulak, Managing Editor
August 2024
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