Dear Reader,

All my words have left me. My tongue has slithered sluglike from the hollow of my mouth.

It's hard to write in times like these. Hard to speak. But there is something inexplicable in the written word, something ineffable. Fiction and poetry are the canvases on which we paint our hopes and dread. In systems that would silence us, writers scream with the scribbling of pens, the soft clacking of keyboards. "Writers are among the most sensitive, the most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists," Toni Morrison once wrote. "The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power." The act of writing is an act of power, the key on the kite string calling down the lightning. It is a lever long enough, a fulcrum strong enough, that we might yet move the world with it. It is a power that can transform us.

This is one of the longest issues we've ever published, including our very first novelette, written by Somto Ihezue. The stories and poems in it are breathtaking in their scope, relentless in their rhythms, magnificent in their mastery, but more than that, each contains a tiny piece of resistance, chits and drabs of insistent affirmation, a voice that refuses to be silenced. I hope you like it.

And thank you, as always, for reading,
Leon

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Leon Perniciaro, Editor
Haven Spec Magazine

© 2024 Leon Perniciaro