EDITORS LETTER

THE MATERIAL ISSUE

In conversations about literature, we often speak of ‘material’ as the stuff of experience that must be discovered and refined into art, as in: “The poet found her material traipsing through the backwoods of her youth.” In truth, though, a writer’s material needs are few: a pen or pencil, a notebook, perhaps a computer. Coffee, tea, or booze sometimes seem to help. And snacks are often essential, as is a warm, quiet room. Compared to a painter’s studio, with its tubes and tubs, its canvases and rags and brushes, a writer’s desk is spare. 

Does the writer envy the painter? Does he long for the tactile work of the potter at her wheel, the weight of a sculptor’s chisel in his empty hand? Many writers must. When they put humble pen to page they, too, endeavor to summon a plentitude of image and sensation. Like the painter, the potter, and sculptor, they want to make something real in the world, to shape it, and dirty their hands with life’s substances—its wet, vibrant colors, oozing clays, and rough-hewn rocks. It’s no wonder, then, that this issue’s theme—materiality—has proved enticing to so many writers. Nor is it surprising that the question of materiality, essential as it is to all the arts, has catalyzed such fruitful conversation and exchange between those who write and those who paint, draw, sculpt, make.  

Such exchange is what this journal is all about. We hope this issue, our largest offering to date, will spark more talk, more ideas and art. Putting it together has already summoned much discussion among us, the editors. From over six hundred submissions sent our way this past fall, we had the vexing task of selecting the gifts you find here. 

In curating the issue, we favored work that limned the relationship between the material and immaterial, the seen and unseen. In her essay “In Every Card, A Little God,” Pune Dracker discovers in the ordinary scratch-off lottery card a link to Lady Fortuna, ritual, and community. In the artwork of Kathleen Granados, spoons and frayed dish towels hint at lost intimacies. In an exhibition of bio art featuring interactions between living organisms–algae, fungi, bacteria–the critic Leah Triplett Harrington finds the socio-aesthetic virtue of interdependence. We also feature new fiction from Vaiva Grainytė, the librettist and co-creator of the opera-performance Sun & Sea, which received the Golden Lion Award at the 2019 Venice Biennale. In her novel excerpt, two friends email each other stories about encounters with new animal friends—a stray kitten, a wounded owl—and find in the work of tending to their bodily needs something like joy.   

These and the many other essays, poems, fictions, and artworks shared here suggest that the material and the metaphysical can never be sundered. In our imaginations, they are ever intertwined. A given material can, in the hands of an artist, become a portal to that which is not in her hands–that which is desired, dreamed of, called up from the past, or hoped for in the future. 

And because we encounter material not only in the artist’s studio, but in every facet of our lives, we have organized this issue according to different realms of experience. We begin with the most intimate and tender—the body (human bodies and those of other creatures)—and move outward, to the home—where the essayist Jet Toomer confronts in the familiar household chore of laundry an ancestral legacy of racialized servitude. We then pay a visit to the library, where Molly Springfield finds a trove of books by and about Virginia Woolf and is thereby inspired to create a new series of drawings, and where Marcus Civin encounters a sculpture-poem made by Theaster Gates entirely out of books. Then we go off to work with Goya (in J.C. Todd’s ekphrastic poem), with Dereck Stafford Mangus (waxing bronzes at the Baltimore Museum of Art), and with Quincy Gray McMichael (hauling organic pig feed in Virginia). Finally, we stroll through the city, donning the marvelously strange helmets of Singaporean artist Khairullah Rahim and taking our chances as they come in the lottery of life with Pune Dracker. 

We begin the issue, though, with a unique collaboration with the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. Earlier this year, we invited writers in our region to send us ekphrastic poetry and prose inspired by art included in Pour, Tear, Carve, an exhibition at the museum that considers how materials can act as conduits of meaning. Baltimore poet Abdul Ali has graciously curated the results of this call in the folio of poems that follow.  

That this unusual project summoned the writing of far more poetry than we expected it would is testament perhaps to the enduring allure of the material for those of us (all of us) who work daily with language to fashion new realities. Writers need artists, and artists need writers. May the conversation continue.  

–The Editors