Welcome to this Issue

Somewhere in the process of editing this issue I had an email exchange with Heather Debling about the title of her short story, eventually settling on “Resilience.” This is what I kept thinking about when reading the story of children lost on the forest with their eco-anxious teacher, how much resilience they’d need if they were to get out alive. No spoilers—read the story! As I continued to go through the issue, I saw that resilience was required on most pages, a word that had joined the cluster of descriptors such as “unprecedented” or “new normal” that have risen to the surface of our vocabulary these past years.

I was hoping that we’d have reached the “post-resilience” era, when this trait was no longer needed in such super-size quantities, where, for example, the shocking horrors of war might be a distant, tainted memory, where there might not be a need to hear the powerful and insightful voices in this issue as part of the Dispatches collection of essays that take us to ground level when considering the role of writer in a time of crisis.

But alas, there is still need for resilience, and Kyo Maclear, Irfan Ali, Gary Barwin, Pacinthe Mattar, Saeed Teebi, Madeleine Thien, and Ayelet Tsabari, have each written their own perspective on the roles and responsibilities of writers in such times. When taken as a whole, they underscore the unbounded resilience practiced by everyone with even a tenuous link to the current Israel-Hamas conflict, including, of course, the writers themselves. It would be nice to think that we no longer needed this sustained strength, that there could be a period of letting go. In the meantime, their words educate and motivate us, allowing empathy and understanding to seep in.

Elsewhere in the issue it’s evident that we have become masterful in the art of true grit, well trained, conditioned, and versed. I recognized it in our fiction line-up, beginning with the profound grief we see in the narrator of Daryl Bruce’s “Harold”; in the young girl’s anguish when witnessing her father’s infidelity in Nedda Sarshar’s “Soap”; in the face of complicated threats to a work colleague for the food show presenter in Mina Sharif ’s “Lemon Print Scarf ’; and in the disorienting sense of loss as a teenager turns against her mother in Pamela Hensley’s “Paulina.”

In other fiction, we’re in for a wild ride with Mark Anthony Jarmon’s “The Bodies” as two friends try to get rid of, well, two bodies. The wild ride continues with Alex Pugsley’s “The Calvin Dover Show” when a former writer on a comedy sketch program reunites with his old friend in the eponymous show.

Nostalgia casts a poetic hand in Terese Svoboda’s “Cozy Island,” where a woman and her young son visit the island of her former lover, while in Rishi Midha’s “In the Western City” the narrator visits his hometown and reflects on the widening cultural differences between him and the friends of his youth now that he is living in Toronto.

In nonfiction, as part of our Writer at Large series, Kasia Jaronczyk takes us back to the Poland of her youth in “Polish Communist Barbie,” where every girl adored the fake Barbie known as Fleur. We return to our Day Jobs series with the essay “Of Scripts and Syntax” by Vincent Anioke in which he reveals how his job as a software engineer intersects with his other job, that of a writer.

In poetry we are delighted to have Robyn Sarah return to our pages with five poems, “In the Medical Building Lobby Café,” “Shadows in Springtime,” “The Last Good Days,” “Tapestry,” and “Once More.” In addition, we have Carolyn Smart with “Sick to death,” “Late Afternoon Walk,” and “Revelation”; Susan Glickman with “Like Instruments,” “The Greenwood,” and “What I Learned from Living Abroad”; Kevin Shaw with “Arboretum,” “Christmas in July,” and “Once More to the Lake; and Bren Summers with three poems, “Load Upon Load,” “My Father’s Shovel,” and “Seven Pounds.”

In periods of crisis, we often hone in on and then cling to words and phrases as a shorthand to understand the situation. Such words bring people together as they become part of common parlance. While there is a practical use for words such as “resilience” to describe what is most needed at the moment, I hope that the frequency with which we use it will not render it meaningless. Until we reach a post-resilient world, we have to continue to pay attention to these words, and understand the profound effect they have on us all.

—Pamela Mulloy