Over Christmas, my parents reminded me that when I was an angry child, I’d write nasty notes about them on the underside of the furniture: “I hate Mom,” “Dad is mean,” etc. I remember writing something similar on a sheet of notebook paper and stuffing it down into the crack between my bed and the wall, where I believed it would never be found. My parents said they’d have no idea the notes were there—until they moved the furniture, turning the coffee table over and discovering my message. I asked my husband—did you do this too? He did—and he grew into a writer too.

I’m thinking about this editor’s note just before AWP, when a throng of writers will descend upon Kansas City, Missouri, each with their little notebook of secret thoughts. I joke to my husband: I’m going to ask every person who comes by the TIR table—“did you write mean notes to your parents and put them in hidden places?” I like thinking about the beginnings of these writers, the way their impulse formed, what need it satisfied. A little mind-bending to think of this first need: to make thought embodied, thingy; to communicate—but to a non-audience, to the reader under the furniture. An articulation that does not speak, per se.

I hope you find the pieces in this issue characteristic of that exteriorized interior (or interiorized exterior could be as accurate) that writing makes possible. To me, it could be writing’s most essential quality (and a particular feature of poetry, I feel, as a poet, compelled to add). I experience a private charge when I read Janice N. Harrington’s poem “The Snuff Tin,” for example, as I imagine the speaker turning the titular artifact of many generations over in her hands and finding inside it plaits of hair. Or when I encounter Chelsea Tokuno-Lynk’s short story, “Yonsei,” in which we’re given access to the internal family drama we only see when we’re deep in a household’s intimacy. I see the quality, too, in Sai Pradhan’s essay “Bone on Bone,” in the speaker’s quiet resistance to the grating, persistent callousness of the medical establishment and of racist microaggressions. “There’s no more cushion left,” says Pradhan, of her ankle. We’re right there with Pradhan, too, with very little buffer, no varnishing, no whitewashing. It’s fallen out of fashion to say that writing and reading help us flex our empathic muscles. But the mind of another on the page—its intimacy, its confidence—still make me gasp, like a cold plunge. It’s invigorating, no? And good for you. Dive in.

—Katie Berta, Managing Editor