I have never been good at keeping things. While others in my family make fine art from ticket stubs, I’m quick to throw things away. Very rarely I will hang on to an old t-shirt or childhood toy. I do still have a few ancient mixed CD’s because even if I forgot most of a year, I can still meet my past self through Andrew Bird. I changed a bit when some of my memories began to dissolve. Suddenly I wished I had a scrapbook telling me, “You were here. This is who you were.” Isn’t that what we associate with our memory—a way of understanding and sharing ourselves?

For being something we consider essential to who we are and a way of grounding ourselves, memory is a slippery matter. The ones we crave can elude us while others plague us. Buried memories—good or bad—can resurface for no apparent reason. We also must ask ourselves how much we can trust our memories. They undoubtedly change over time, but even in the present a group of people can walk away with a dozen different versions of the same story; seemingly small differences in perspective have the power to shape a narrative significantly. And as these narratives are passed on, they show that memories can grow beyond a personal experience into part of a larger history. They also reveal the danger of selective memory and how sharing truth is, as the recently deceased poet bell hooks said, “a struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Our writers for this issue explore both the strengths and glitches of memory. In our first publication of a visual art show, Soyoung L. Kim guides us through the paintings and sculptures of her exhibit WATER MEMORY, using her own life story to meditate on disconnection, transformation, and roots. Sarah Clark shows how difficult it can be to prove our memories and how mundane reminders of our pasts can lead to existential wrestling. Mary Grace Mangano examines how landscape and understanding where one comes from shaped the poetry of Andrea Zanzotto and John O’Donohue. Annie Joy Williams reflects on her memories as a white, Southern woman as she learns about collective memory in Justin R. Phillips’s book Know Your Place.

We hope these words and art can allow you to pause and examine the depths of your own memories—who you were and who you have become. We also hope you look at the world and those around you with greater wonder, curiosity, and a hunger for truth. As for me, I’ll try to keep a few more tokens of the present and look forward to a day when I can try to place them.

Fare forward,

Whitney Rio-Ross

Poetry Editor