Editor’s Note

In Maggie Nelson’s groundbreaking work of nonfiction, Bluets, she describes travelling to visit a friend in the hospital who is recovering from an accident that has left her paralyzed and quadriplegic. Grieving, Nelson becomes overwhelmed and depressed. Meanwhile her friend spends her time writing long letters to people in her life. In each she begins with a brief acknowledgment of her ongoing pains, before moving on to focus on other matters of more interest. Nelson is deeply moved by this, as was I when I first read it. How can her friend, in such an undeniably bleak situation, manage to carry on with such resiliency?

It’s a good question for all of us, at a time like ours. A recent Gallup poll found that the percentage of Americans who “anticipate high-quality lives in five years” has dropped to its lowest point since they began surveying in 2009. Our collective spirits are, in 2026, about 9 points worse than they were in 2020 during the COVID pandemic.

Of course, it’s not difficult to explain why this might be—reasons for optimism aren’t exactly abounding right now. Locally, nationally, globally, things feel out of control, unfixable. And among artists and writers this sense of pessimism is hard to push back against. When I asked students in my Craft of Fiction class the other day about the conventions in stories today they’re most tired of, one of the first things to come up was dystopian settings. Turns out we don’t really want to read about the world falling apart, when it actually is. But what then, do we want?

Maggie Nelson writes, of her injured friend’s resilience:

“Imagine someone saying, ‘Our fundamental situation is joyful.’ Now imagine believing it. // Or, forget belief: imagine feeling, even for a moment, that it were true.”

Reading those lines for the first time all but shattered me. I laughed out loud. Joyful? Seriously? But then I caught myself. I knew I had felt that way, many times, in the past. When, exactly, had it changed?

And could I—could we—possibly, find some way back to it?

Nelson’s friend tries, through sending those letters. It is true social contact, and it is writing, that she turns to in an awful situation.

Can a book change the world? Can a short story? An essay? A poem?

Posed with this question, author Zadie Smith once replied, “I don’t know if a book can change the world. But I believe that it can change the weather.”

We could all use a change in the weather right about now. A reminder that our fundamental situation is still joyful.

Here then, are thirty-eight weather-changing pieces, a collection of poems, stories, and essays that push boundaries and buttons, that imagine other worlds and new language.

It will take a lot more than lines of prose and poetry to turn things around in the world, but great writing can play a role in the crucial first part, in turning our sense of possibility around, and helping us to feel—or believe—that there are better days ahead.

Kristopher Jansma