Spring 2014

Editor’s Note

“No need to come dressed in the colors of water, friend I meet everywhere, mother of starry blue space; and if the world cannot be saved, may each be saved in secret from the world. Don’t waste a death on me; let me come to you.”

– Franz Wright, “Our Mother”

As we say goodbye to Houston’s shortest most intense imitation of spring, we bring you the next installment of Story|Houston. I’m going to be honest; Editor’s Notes give me the creeps. It’s too much foreplay. The work is here, it is engaged in its own seduction or bamboozling, and I should let it be for you what it means to be without my own belly-dancing appropriation.

If anything pithy can be said about these pieces, I suppose it is that they are all concerned with the self-inflicted hauntings we suffer (what you might call memories); the way in which what one knows—or thinks one knows—about love or self or other seeps into successive todays to strangle or liberate or still the mind. It is what a lot of writing is about, I think, but what the best and loveliest writing does really well; cracks you open if it’s nice, leaves you for dead if it’s great.

We didn’t mean for it to turn out this way. We are drawn to things we can’t always name. But read for yourself and enjoy.

 

Kafah Bachari
Senior Editor
Story|Houston