A FEW WORDS AND A FEW WORDS MORE

THIS IS WHERE I ADMIT THAT I STARTED THIS NOTE A DOZEN times or more over the past ten days, each attempt producing only a few feeble words surrounding the subject of inspiration, like water circling the drain, before I falter, fade, and go still again. This might be the most difficult, by which I mean the most exacting, writing prompt I have ever felt the obligation to follow: Write about inspiration while the horrors of war, its all-consuming violence and suffering, reverberate across the distance like a thunderclap through the broken sky. A few words, then a few more ineffectual words, then silence. I’ll never know enough to make sense of war. It ends in silence, every time.

When I don’t know what to think—or do, or say, or how to be in this constantly confusing, disappointing, dangerous, still beautiful, and magically inspiring world, I turn to the writers, always the writers, and they show me a way. The path forward often twists and turns, but it inevitably leads to a renewed sense of our shared humanity. In her essay “Fire: Be the Revolution” (page 34), the first in our special section exploring the alchemy of inspiration, story sorcerer Lidia Yuknavitch quotes the incomparable Toni Morrison, who in her own essay “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear” wrote: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” In her accompanying writing exercise, Yuknavitch writes, “Name one kind of fire within you, one that keeps you from despair and moves you toward courage in the world,” then asks us to consider where that internal fire came from. For me it’s Toni Morrison, Lidia Yuknavitch, and all the others—eternal gratitude to the hearts and minds of debut poets (46)—whose words, ideas, and questions swirl together to spark our imaginations and fan the flames.

The exquisite image on our cover, by the illustrator and portrait painter Tim O’Brien, is titled “Silver Lining.” Like all compelling art, it reveals to me a new reflection nearly every time I look at it. I see in the sun-kissed distance a measure of hope, in the fractured sky a hint of foreboding, in the pastoral landscape an oasis of calm, in the still-dark littoral zone a peaceful gloom or hidden fear, and in the silvery cascade the imperfect alchemy of inspiration, a time for tears, release, replenishment. A few words. A deluge of feeling.