Editor’s Note
BY KATE GASKIN
MENTORSHIP CO-DIRECTOR
Sometimes it’s imperative to lean into darkness. To accept the cold and bitter weather.
The bareness of trees in winter. Latticework of snow on grass. Hawks circling above. Sitting still with solitude helps us to notice these things. Noticing things helps us notice others. Noticing others helps us see that we all share the pressure point where deep love and deep grief meet.
So no more denying it, okay? We know that spring and summer in all their erratic abundance will return, but right now nights are long and light is short. Let’s welcome sorrow, worry, pain, even terror. “No feeling is final,” Rilke said, etc. etc. This is part of the nature of walking among the kingdom of the living, and if we sit with darkness long enough it begins to look like another kind of gift.
The writers in Issue 52 know this, and they’re here to accompany you through icy days and bleak nights. In Kathy Fagan’s poem “Planned Community,” she writes “I don’t want to write / about death anymore…” Instead, her speaker contemplates “…What is the opposite of ghost, // they ask. Wild carrot, curly dock, little bluestem.” These are the wild places a planned development can’t tame and a reminder that grief can be a generative phenomenon. In “The week you died,” Kristen Shu-ying Chen details how witnessing death is sacred and terrible but also sometimes bizarrely funny and community-oriented: “You loved a party so we had one / We got into bed with you / spilled red wine / combed your matted hair.”
In “Almost Pregnant,” Molly Thornton writes about the circular lengths a queer family must navigate in order to conceive. Her essay details the hope and tenacity she and her wife hold, even in the face of uncertainty: “I will be at the mercy of nature and at the feet of its abundance, yet I’ll continue to make small attempts at mastery, knowing it does not exist.”
Christina MacSweeney’s translation of Elisa Levi’s haunting excerpt from That’s All I Know describes a dark and dangerous forest situated at the end of the world. Events unfold as if in a nightmare, but this story is also strangely comforting in its disorientation. The narrator assures us that everything will be okay while also directly confronting the terror of the unknown: “Mother Nature made the forest for us to be frightened of, so death, despair, and darkness would always be in our minds, ’cause when you go in there you can’t see the sun, there’s only dark shadows, and no matter how much moss, how many compasses, how good a memory or sense of direction you have, the forest gobbles you up like a hungry rabbit.”
And in Abhishek Sengupta’s short story “Three is Not a Number,” a lowly chai stand operator named Pintoo becomes the guardian angel of a student protestor. Through his eyes, we see how vulnerable and brave she is to stand up against injustice at the cost of her health and safety. When “memsaab,” as he calls her, is harmed in a protest, Pintoo goes to great trouble to find her and deliver something she has left behind, even though, as he puts it, “justice and ghosts only exist in the ether and rarely reveal themselves to the living.”
In all these pieces, death and darkness exist overtly, even comfortably, but love and hope persist as they always do.
On a personal note, it has been my great privilege to serve as one of The Adroit Journal’s poetry editors for the last six years. It is with some wistfulness (I will really miss reading poetry submissions!) and great anticipation that I can say I will be joining John Allen Taylor as co-director of the Summer Mentorship Program, which pairs established writers with high-school-aged writers. We’ll be opening for submissions on February 5th, so if you are a writer who could benefit from this wonderful mentorship opportunity, please consider applying. Additionally, if you know any promising high school writers please send them our way: https://theadroitjournal.org/about/mentorship/
Kate Gaskin
Mentorship Co-director
