Letter from the Editor

Dear reader,

I think it’s safe to say that most of us do not follow the concept of time with the same sense of constancy we used to. This issue has taken longer than anticipated to get together, but like much of life, Sinking City has had to go through many transformations. Thank you for your dear, dear patience.

We have been graced with a multitude of pieces this reading period, by a diverse collective of writers, especially by emerging writers, and for works that bend the boundaries a little more, because what else can we to make sense of the world than by breaking the very structures (of anything) at the seams?

As a nod to our fiction writer from this issue, Anita Goveas, I constantly think about the concept of “environmental disturbance”, and what that looks like in our everyday world at this point. The way in which the physical world destroys, more and more every day: “the building or the tearing down” that Bryan Harvey talks writes about. Or we can extend it to metaphorical, what we “take for granted, for what it is” (taken from Thad DeVassie’s poem), or to the idea of “saving time”, or bending the continuum” (quoted from Chloé Firetto-Toomey’s poem).

“But what of the field, you ask?” (Esther Vincent Xueming). We can think of “field” through so many dimensions. The field of the backyard, in which we inhabit for most of our days nowadays, when we need to take a break from the screen. Maybe we come back to the field our childhood. Or perhaps we take time to revisit fields of our memory, to remember what a more transient :

“when it starts raining frogs and broken crutches / everyone will take notice”.
“Perhaps for the first time / since the toys were taped shut […]”, we play with them again.

What I’m attempting to get at is we have been gifted with a new issue which addresses and speaks to all of this unrest. Each piece responds in some way with deliberate meditation, care, sometimes through the element of the fantastic, and others with humor (I’m thinking specifically of Michael Chang’s piece, which includes the collective “we are poet”).

Thank you all again for your continued dedication and engagement to our magazine. We hope you enjoy issue 9!

P.S: I dedicate this issue to my close friend, Michael, who left this world too soon.

With love and gratitude,