Dear Reader,

I’ve been a voracious reader since my earliest childhood, encouraged by a mother who read to me daily and who devoured innumerable books herself. I’ve stuffed my current home so full of books that my husband has some legitimate fears for the floor joists, and nonetheless I still haunt book sales and Little Free Libraries.

I can say quite candidly that books have saved my life—and not just once either, but over and over again. Certainly I’ve never been carrying a volume in my breast pocket just when I needed to stop a bullet. But there have been times in my life when, if it had not been for books, I would have felt myself (rightly or wrongly) to be completely and utterly alone. Instead, I found myself happily in the company of Martin the Warrior, Hazel and Fiver, Phineas Finn, John Ames, and a host of others. They carried me through.

Nor am I alone in finding real comfort and companionship in the company of fictional people. In her essay “Imagination and Community,” Marilynne Robinson writes, “I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of—who knows it better than I?—people who do not exist.” The alchemy that makes this real and intimate connection with imaginary people possible is what we set out to explore in this issue of Fare Forward, The Art of Storytelling.

Though she writes of it self-deprecatingly, Robinson expresses no regret for the time she has spent thus involved in the lives of her characters. Earlier in the same essay, she posits that “community… consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly,” adding later, “I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.” For me too, fiction has been both an education in community and, at times, a community in and of itself.

The imaginative love Robinson describes shines through in dozens of ways in the pages of this issue. David Priest describes the process of trying to write a realistic novel and discovering he had left out the very ground of Being in “God in the Hands of a Realist Writer.” J.C. Scharl offers a doorway into an uncommon way to read stories in “Turn & Turn Again: The Art of Reading Narrative Poetry.” And poetry editor Whitney Rio-Ross confesses to understanding Jane Austen’s Persuasion a bit better after gaining some life experience in “Not Wise Yet.”

We are also thrilled that this issue includes the winners of our 2023 Poetry Contest. Our warmest congratulations to Nadine Ellsworth-Moran, Colm O’Shea, and Andrew Callis, and to our runners-up, Sally Thomas and Mia Schilling Grogan. We are also deeply appreciative of D.S. Martin, who served as the final judge for this year’s contest.

Fare Forward,

Sarah Clark
Editor-in-Chief