From the Editor

Like many of you, I’m surviving this pandemic baking bread. What I’ve found surprising about yeast is its tenacity. Its determination. Even when I have most definitely messed up, the yeast forgives, and it pushes the dough and salt up and up, to be punched down and rise up again. All it needs, it seems, is a bit of support, a lot of love from your hands, care, attention. 

Also, perhaps like many of you these days, I find myself unsure of what to do, how to help, what to say. Nothing feels right or enough. And so I feel like “passing the mic” to those who’ve lived with systemic injustice their whole lives, those whose time has finally finally come. And so I give you Bracken Issue VII Accompaniment – a collection of music that is close to my heart, and that is teaching me so much right now, when all I want to do is listen. The music in this collection speaks of the good and bad and more bad of the African experience in Haiti, Mali, and the US. It also carries hope. And, as a dear friend said just the other day, “hope is a scary thing.” But let us dare to hope for a better world.

It’s hard to believe, but the gorgeous Issue VII cover Out of the Forest I Come by Amanda Greive was selected weeks before the protests began. Once I saw it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. All I could think about was roots and ties. Roots of the forest. Roots in Africa. Ties of bindweed. Ties of chains. How fitting now. This cover.

Birthing an issue is a mysterious process, even after seven issues. Working on it for months, soliciting, selecting, deciding, you’re barely aware of what you’re building. Until it’s built. And you look at it and you see all the connections, underground water channels, root systems that bind it.

The one piece of fiction in this issue, Katherine L. Hester’s “Bunting,” flows from the urban reality of city life, office life, back into the woods. The roots. The simpler times. All instinct. “What would it be like, to stay here forever?” Hester’s character asks. Indeed. I wonder about that myself. Specifically, what would our world look like if our souls lived in the forest more?

In poetry, Kelli Russell Agodon’s “In the Middle of a Forest, I Turn Off My Life” resonates beautifully with our cover and takes us into the woods, thoughtfully. Rebecca Patrascu’s, “Stamina,” imagines the world without us, without words. “No language but the long tongue of Manzanita bark / stripping in the heat of the sun.”

This issue’s poetry section also brims with water. Water—the emotion, the organismic roots, survival. I’ll let you discover Bracken’s waterways for yourself, without a guide, on instinct.

I feel like the Earth is angry. We’re angry. To create now is to tap into that anger and I think you will find the poetry in this issue does this beautifully. Anger over gender issues, mistreatment, abandonment, ethnic inequality...it is all there. For many of us, creativity is born of anger. You could imagine that Claudia Grünig’s Women in Trees photo series is born out of anger, just as you could imagine it born out of the love of trees...and women. Whatever you think, I as a “professional woman” of today relate deeply to these images, of the trees both supporting and suspending. And now, I cannot look at these images without thinking of Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit” and hearing Billie Holiday’s aching rendition.

With the rest of the art in this issue, I wish for you to slow down, to zoom in, to look at things close enough to see, to notice the beauty and the ruin—the beauty of the ruin—around us.

I must thank our tireless, inspired, and passionate Bracken team: Jessica Bixel, T. Clear, Charlotte d'Huart, Bridget Houlihan, Ted McMahon, Jed Myers, and V. Wesley. This is your baby.

The bread’s out of the oven. It’s risen, despite my mistakes. The yeast’s tenacity matched only by its forgiveness.

-Alina Rios