Introduction to Issue Four

A Note from the Editors

This summer, we are reminded that no place is ever just one place. Kitchens, basements, bedrooms, train cars, gardens, cities, oceans—they all transform between and within us, unfurling meanings and memories, multiplying across our varied experience of them.

Like sitting in the summer heat, many of us might be feeling a combination of rejuvenation and exhaustion, of fire and salt. Within each of us an overwhelming feeling that there is too much to absorb and hold. But a place, a space outside our heated bodies, can hold some of what we carry instead, the way words can. A place, a poem, a story—they can hold the wildflowers swaying brightly in a meadow, as well as the bones scattered underneath. They can take us down a path that changes with the seasons, one day leading us to a cozy house on a hill, the next to a windswept cliff. They might reveal to us faces long gone, or else reflect our own face back to us—who we are, who we were, who we might become.

We hope you'll let our contributors' work transport you for a little while to places you might recognize, and places you might not, where we know you'll feel more than just one thing—maybe innumerable things—and where you are free to wander and return as often as you wish.

We'll be keeping a spare key under the doormat and a glass of water on the sill just for you.

— Cara Downey and Erin Calabria

Issue Four image credits: all photographs featured in the issue’s table of contents were taken or provided by our contributors with the following exceptions: photo credit George Hollyer for Joyce Hida’s “On Backlot Supernovas and Leaving Philly”; photo credit Persephone Ulrich for Cathy Ulrich’s “In All That Light”; photo credit Cara Downey for Twila Newey’s “Unspool” and for the issue cover.