We welcome this new issue of Meniscus, which is crammed with poems and short stories and flash fiction, all of them reflecting the imaginations, voices and observations of writers who are doing what writers do: translating the world into text. The writers published here hail from across the globe: from the Americas, the UK and Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. They hold various identities, bring various levels of prior experience in writing, and work their genres in a multitude of ways. This stunning range of experiences and contexts mean they produce a kaleidoscopic swirl through the possibilities of language, the multiplicities of ways of telling, and the performativity enabled by creative writing, thinking and practice.

​

Some observations we made, on reading the submissions and editing the works we selected, include the attention so many writers give to memory. In fact, in many cases it is memory that functions as the engine of the piece. Sometimes memory is portrayed not as passive recollection, but as active and deeply personal—memories that shape present choices, emotions, and identities. In other cases, instances of memory reveal how the characters experience subtle forms of alienation and disconnection—distance from others, from their past selves, or from the lives they hoped to live. And in others again, images and accounts of everyday moments and objects become vessels for memory and for disconnection, revealing the emotional depth hidden in the quotidian.

​

Moving from the individual to the general: we are conscious of the shifting dynamics of both the global economy and the literary sector: the pressures coming on publishers, the closing down of literary studies in universities around the world, and the concerns often voiced about the possible decline of reading in favour of viewing, or scrolling. However, there is nothing new about such pressures; as long ago as 1996 Salman Rushdie wrote, rather scathingly, about the sorts of panicked comments, along these lines, being offered by writers like George Orwell, George Steiner, Paul Auster, VS Naipaul. Literature, it seems, has never had a future, but it always has a profound present. We value the confidence shown by so many contemporary authors to write and keep writing; to shift the frameworks of writing; to reshape genres; and to offer new points of view and new ways of living in the world.

​

Jen Webb, Ginna Brock, Deb Wain and Alyssa Waldon (for the editors)

​

Rushdie, Salman 1996 ‘In defense of the novel, yet again’, The New Yorker (June 24): 48–55