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.

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