Dear Solstice Readers,
The use of memory is vital to writers. Writers observe, and what we observe becomes our memories that we plumb and fathom to fashion our constructs – whether poems, or stories, or essays. We try to make sense of all that experience – whether lived or learned – and distill it into something that can transport and transform the reader.
If memory falters, what we construct falters as well. Possibly Gabriel García Márquez knew this well as dementia encroached upon him. Maybe the first presentiment is sensing that there are holes and gaps in your memory. It’s not what it’s used to be. Maybe García Márquez sensed that something was not quite right, that he could not follow the threads of plot and weave of characters as he was writing Until August, and put it aside and asked that it be destroyed and never published before he reached possibly the worst threshold of dementia for a writer: having a memory so fallible and distorted that he could no longer recognize that his memory was so corrupt. That possibly he ceased to know what memory actually is.
Recent events in our collective political, and cultural, memory indicate a similar breakdown in memory. For a good deal of this year the question of whether you were better off four years ago was bantered about. But the question was framed to elicit a response of an intolerable present, a reality on fire. No one really wanted to look back four years ago honestly and relive the images of body bags piled into refrigerator trucks, an economy shut down and in shambles, cities in deep unrest at inequities and failures to deliver basic civil rights – among them the right just to live and breathe.
There are many reasons for this failure of memory, and while that is concerning, what’s most concerning is that we are embarking on a severely flawed reality whose basis is a selective and distorted collective memory.
The reality that is going forward does not value diversity, equity and inclusion. And it’s here where I’ll go out on a limb and state that Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices will not waver from our mission, which is to “publish writers of diverse nationalities, races and religions, and also writers from diverse cultures within our culture… to present colliding, diverse, sometimes controversial, points of view. We want to stir dialogue among our readers… We believe probing into diversity can promote unity. We want to shake things up. Cause some ferment. After all, Solstice is renewal.”
These are our values: We learn and experience from the breadth of life, of reality, from the center as well as the margins. One can either sleepwalk though life, or one can use the strength of their vision to meet life’s challenges. Dear Readers, if you are still with us, I invite you to read our pages, and dive into pogroms and the lives of immigrants (for we humans are a wandering lot and all of our ancestors have come from somewhere else). I invite you to keep memory strong and to value each other and the variety of existence.
I thank you for taking the time to read our issue, and to reflect on what you have read. And if what you have read has moved you in any way, to think also about donating to us and help us continue to do our good work because we have no choice but to do as Bertolt Brecht said:
“In the dark times
Will there be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”
Gian Lombardo
Editor-in-Chief
