Dear Reader,

In his poem “The Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost writes a dialog in which his characters debate the meaning of the word “home.” Warren calls it “the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” His wife Mary counters, “I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” In both definitions, there is a sense of belonging, of being a part of something intrinsically; without question, by Warren’s definition, and without dessert, by Mary’s. We often think of home as something simple, enshrining the concept in cliches and thinking we understand it. But the kind of belonging that Frost describes can be very hard to find in our current moment—moves, losses, and family conflicts often leave us homeless, despite never lacking a place to lay our heads.

In this issue of Fare Forward, we set out to interrogate the cracks and fissures in our mythology of home, to look at the divisions in both our ideas and our hearts that interfere with our ability to truly belong. In their stories of living without roots, of finding more than one place to call home, and of returning to a home we thought we’d left behind for good, our writers point to the crucial need to love and invest ourselves in the places where we find ourselves, if we are ever to find a place we can call, even just for the time being, home. And they demonstrate, too, how the places that we love in the here and now point to a greater and fuller idea of home than this world alone can provide.

Fare forward,
Sarah Clark
Editor-in-Chief