ISSUE 17: DESIRE

9.12.2015

Dear Reader:

Nothing connects us quite like desire. We all want something we believe will get us to a better place. Our desire propels us every day, and we can all relate to that feeling—that pull—that keeps us wishing, moving, yearning, striving.

Desire doesn’t come in many varieties. We may dress it up differently, but if we dig down to what we truly want, we’ll find that most of us ache for the same things: We want to stop feeling so damn alone. We want to be understood. We want to be happy.

In this issue, a new father, battling loneliness, tries desperately to understand why his son cries all day. Misunderstood by his mother, a man is pushed beyond his limits. A farm-sitter chases runaway cows, chases sobriety, chases peace.

But chasing down one desire can mean balancing it against others. In Brian Gresko’s conversation with Edan Lepucki, Emily St. John Mandel, and Benjamin Percy, we learn how these authors find happiness as writers who balance work, family, and life.

And then there’s sex. In this most basic form of desire, we just want to make a connection—even if that connection is sometimes purely physical. Watch in this issue how easily a character’s selfish sexual appetites can slide past greed into absurdity.

Ultimately it’s the choices we make to attain our desires that truly set us apart. Maybe we beg our wife to come home and soothe the babe. Maybe we plot to kill our mother. Maybe we resolve to wake up at dawn to write our dystopian novel. Or perhaps we give in to lust and get into a lot of trouble.

We hope you will find in every page of this issue the threads of desire that connect us. However different the stories, interviews, or poems may seem, we look in each one for a glimmer of ourselves.