Dear reader,
One of the many changes we made with the publication of Issue 103 this June was to stop separating the fiction from the poetry, the poetry from the creative nonfiction, etc., in our table of contents. We did this in large part to give ourselves more flexibility in ordering the contents of each issue, to allow us more opportunities to play up the convergences that can appear when putting together an issue, to better highlight the strange affinities in the pieces our section editors, reading in isolation, have selected and the interesting juxtapositions that inevitably arise between different writers working in different genres taking on similar subjects.
Having created this new flexibility, of course, we also—without intending to—created for ourselves a new responsibility to, well, order the pieces in each issue. This is not a small thing for worriers and overthinkers like ourselves, reader. How to decide whether Paul Crenshaw’s wondrously compact "Curtains" ought to go next to Clint Smith’s harrowing "After the Storm They Attempted to Identify the Bodies" or Danilo Thomas’s unsettling "Thread the Fatter"? (As is evident, we didn’t decide.) Would it be better to keep them separate and allow the space between them to amplify their faint echoes? Doesn’t Tracey Kry’s debut fiction, the sinister and surprising "The Missing," belong somewhere nearby, too? And what about Beverly Burch’s dense, lyrical "Code, Clue, Undercurrent"? Which thread should we follow? Which undercurrent should draw the issue on?
But rather than getting too inside baseball in this letter, we’ll simply say that, whatever order you read the contents of Issue 105, here you’ll find natural and personal disaster, unknowable surgeries, the spirits of the departed, relationships out of or beyond control, rumors, gossip, and accusations "shot through with grief and disorientation," and we very much hope you will enjoy it.
Thank you so much for reading!
Sincerely,
Gabriel Blackwell
Editor
The Rupture