Reckoning 9 comes to you from a year of reading and discussion—from intervals of not quite thinking we knew what this unthemed issue should look like to flurries of activity, enthusiasm and advocacy. Then, in a slow pull-back at the end of the submission window, everyone on the editorial team started to say okay, yes. Together with the writers, thanks to them and to each other, we are starting to have done the work to make this issue happen.
It’s a remarkable one. I’m tempted to say the individual pieces of writing started talking to each other early and knew what they were collectively about well before the editors did. As C.G. has said, there’s a tremendous amount of grief here. There’s also a repeated witness of tenacity and urgent acts of preservation and restoration. We remember or learn of “six dolphins/safe in a hotel swimming pool” via Allison Whittenberg’s brief, luminous “Katrina.” If the young daughter in Ellen K. Fee’s “baby’s breath” is born into a world that’s losing its flowers, she may yet make something new with the stalks left behind, “begin anything with a bundle of sticks.” Leah Bobet’s “Klamath River Hymn” reminds us, in the leaping of wild salmon, that while our desire for environmental restoration is powerful and can work in tandem with natural forces, repair itself is not a quick process. That we must have patience for the process of mending, wherever it begins.
We’re glad you’re joining with us to read, to mourn, to consider, to plan, to create. May these stories, poems, and essays accompany you well in the coming year.
