Editor’s Note on the Summer 2017 Issue

//

It is becoming clear that we are in the midst of a great unraveling — directly, as many among us are targeted and victimized due to our cultural, gender, political, or racial identities, and psychologically, as we find ourselves stifled by anxiety, by an untethered sense of urgency and uncertainty, by fears that are both personal and global in scope. Indeed, our executive branch and its sycophants trade in fear. They erect it like an immense stone monument and demand that we live in its shadow. How can we not wilt in this darkness? And how do we confront the consequent outrage, worry, and divisiveness that germinates within it?

I have felt for some time that all writing — all self-exploring, world-exploring writing — is a method of truth-seeking. There is truth in our narratives and in our observations. In this era of misinformation, observation becomes crucial. Observation becomes resistance.

To that end, the theme of this issue of Lines + Stars is “Resist.” Our contributors overtly address the failures and fearmongering of the administration, but also engage with resistance in other forms: the resoluteness of the natural world, the power of fire, hidden strength that surfaces amid crisis, anger transformed into action. Most keenly, they recognize the persistence of their own voices and their desire to see, to translate, this complicated existence of ours.

To the powers that aim to restrain us, to the anti-intellectuals, to the willfully asleep: We will continue to write and to create. We will continue to fight you. We understand that when we stay awake and aware — even when we feel overcome by the stress of this time, even when our impact seems desperately small — we allow our minds to live.

Thank you for reading.

Rachel Cloud Adams
Editor, Lines + Stars