A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Dear friends,

As my grandma would say, “How you?” I’m thankful to be back, bearing a new issue in hand.

There’s an element of ecological psychedelia in Issue Six: Vivarium, from the haptic feedback of neon color in Jaina Cipriano's visual work, to the yellow-green hues and undulating waves of Marsae Lynette and Shawn Antoine II’s “SpellING”, to the more-than-human characters that drive Lucas March’s speculative fiction, and much more. 

As they are watched inside their vivaria, these subjects are also watching themselves. They are redrawing the boundaries of their observatories - reckoning at the edge and end of the world - peering out to you from the microcosms of their containers.

We live (and have lived) in a time of such ecological precarity. Precarity, in fact, feels like a less accurate word than disaster. There are the wildfires of California and recent hurricanes affecting the Caribbean and Southern US. We continue to watch as entire communities and ecosystems are leveled by genocide in Palestine and Lebanon. We can’t ignore the damaging extraction practices and grave endangering of miners in the Congo, or forced scarcity of natural resources in Sudan. There are countless other instances. This issue contends with our responsibility to a natural world on which we’ve inflicted great damage, as well as the damage we inflict on each other. Some of the speakers in this issue are literally caged, some psychologically or metaphysically. Some wield personified chainsaws, and others duck through the alleys of San Francisco, observing even as they are observed. A crucial part of a vivarium is the aspect of enclosure, which is acutely present throughout this work. At many moments throughout, engaging with the supernatural is the way to dream ourselves out. And, there is that prefix, “viva”—to live. We are always searching for ways to do it, as robustly and generously as we can. 

Dwell with us in our habitats for just a little while.

With love, warmth, and gratitude,

Kameryn Alexa Carter

January 2025