Inside the November/December 2022 Holiday Issue
The Great Untold
Our story has never been told before: the pages before us all are blank. Thrill in it: it is our privilege, our duty, our wild and gargantuan task to decide where we go next.
The magnificent terror of this kept washing over me as I encountered the heretofore untold stories present in this issue. They’re books that subvert what’s expected and that barrel ahead into the unknown with a brazen sense of adventure. You can see it in titles like Nonvert, about the changing-toward-irreligious religious landscape of the US, and in Holy Woman, a memoir about rejecting traditional, patriarchal faith paradigms in pursuit of a model that’s more fulfilling, more feminine, more unbound.
The titles in our nature writing feature are just as unrepentant about shaking off old approaches to the world around us: Between Light and Storm demands that we rethink how we treat the animals with whom we share the earth; Cherokee Earth reminds us that colonialism quashed voices that always knew to celebrate our interconnectedness with the natural world. Here and elsewhere, there are hints of how we might help to heal the planet. And in the self-help feature, titles like Chingona, which speaks with particular power to Latina women whose voices have been undervalued, and Recovering You, which suggests bold holistic treatments of addiction, carve out their own electrifying paths forward.
There’s power to these stories—and perhaps an indication of how we might rewrite the future to make it more inhabitable than traditional perspectives allowed. We hope that you’ll be as inspired by their daring moves as we were.
Ilustration from The Language of Tattoos: 130 Symbols and What They Mean by Oliver Munden, Nick Schonberger. Image used with permission from Frances Lincoln.
Michelle Anne Schingler
