Editor's Remarks

     Joseph Gage CC



     There are so few things I look forward to as much as I do sitting down to write these editorials, which are but all the emotions kicked up in me by all of the incredible and aching soul-work that you all share with us each season. Usually I have a pretty good idea of what it is that I want to say here, but all of my words seem to have moved up ahead of me quite a bit and I have lost sight of them. They'll return when they're ready, I know. So let me just say, in the absence of my own, that I am so grateful to have found yours. There are some things we could never say to anyone before, there are some things we could never even say to ourselves. It helps to feel that there are places where we can say the hard things. Artists aren't always known for keeping the circle warm and open. That could be said for any of us though, in any configuration. We try hard to keep our ear to the track running through the other, but we get in our own way a lot too, lose hold the thread, the muscle and music of the moment. Hopefully returning, more often than not, to warmth and to opening. Home base. 

     Reading the work that you each share helps me immensely. It helps me pay more emotional-attention, listen-deep and wide, and hold more space for all the things that I'm not holding nearly enough space for. Often enough I'll be going through something painful that a submission will hold an answer to, or a soft metaphorical-shoulder to lean upon. Or someone shares with me that they too found an answer or a kind shoulder in our pages here. Whatever else I am in lessens in intensity when I turn to this work, to this place. 

     I am grateful. I am awed. I am but such a small part of all this. Thank you all for making this place a real home, among the many that we must find and make for ourselves and each other along the way. We are here, always, for soul and heart, and there is so much of it in this issue. And pain. So much pain. There's a line I read recently of Winnicott's that I love: "If we have these problems, we shouldn't rush too quickly to try and solve them. It's better to see if we can try and work with the problems we have." Joyce Carol Oates once said that people ask the wrong question when they ask her "how" she is able to write so many books. They almost never, she said, ask me "why". Stories, for Oates, are the way she works out (and with) her problems. Is that not the truest thing? We create to better partner with our problems, digest hurt, hold our losses close, move through old rooms, into open fields, into a bitterly beautiful half-light. Mostly we don't know what we're doing but that we are doing it because we have to. Not just because we need it, but because others need it too. There's no choice. It is that serious, that necessary. 

      It's been such a hard, dark year. Nothing certain, nothing safe. You might think soul doesn't stand a chance in this long dark night of a world, but I must tell you it does, it does. As you move through this issue I think you'll see a little of what I see: such open field brimming with sadness and song, muscle and soul, laughter and light. Mostly, I hope that you'll feel less alone in whatever heaviness you're feeling these days. That all these poems and stories will ring the bell of bells for you. 

        Until we meet again, friends. Thank you for these words. For this very special, warm, and open place that you all have made into what it is because of who you are. A place where soul can shine, and truth and heart stand a fighting chance of beating back the dark. 

In service and gratitude,
James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroin Chic