Borderlands
—Alessandra Naccarato, “Our Lady of the Crisis”
In the aftermath of trauma or crisis, we are often prone to seek certainty, to search for the clearest path forward. The task of editing this issue came to me after a series of trials—health struggles, the loss of a dear family member—left me in a state of perplexed stasis, wondering what shape my life might take now that I’d happened upon a wellspring of resilience I’d never known was within me.
Working on this issue helped me make my way through this inertia. Finding beauty and possibility in the in-between, in uncertainty and flux, the pieces in this issue are an antidote to stagnant thought. They unsettle easy distinctions between timeworn dichotomies: life and death, self and other, art and nature, wildness and domesticity, loss and recovery. In one story, a consummate finder of lost objects discovers that “finding yourself” is not nearly as simple as finding what’s missing. In another, a newlywed’s burgeoning “feral” nature reveals the crueller truth of the quiet brutality of many a modern partnership.