Editor's Note

Kinship. It's a theme that is always vital and relevant, no matter the times and trends. As readers, we are always interested in relationships: with family, with friends, with romantic partners, with office colleagues, with institutions, with nature. With the world writ large. And now, in our time of pandemic, as we amble towards a sense of recovery and normality with the widespread prevalence of—and unfortunately, skepticism and hostility towards—vaccinations, kinship once again stands at the forefront of our minds.

After fourteen months in lockdown—after having plenty of time to reevaluate our priorities and needs, after observing cavalier and reckless behavior—many of us are rethinking and even renegotiating our relationships, just like many of the characters from the prose found in this issue. In an exclusive excerpt from Shawna Kay Rodenberg's debut memoir Kin, she recalls a scene from her childhood with her family, and particularly her father, while living in an End Times, off-the-grid commune that lays the groundwork for such a reassessment. Erin Miller Reid's story "Adrift" depicts a college-aged narrator who, while studying abroad in 1980s West Germany—thousands of miles from her Kentucky home—is sizing up her relationships. Likewise, Laura Marshall's story "The Lost and Found Museum" offers an original, compelling portrait of a place and relationships seemingly frozen in time. In an aching lyric essay, acclaimed novelist Elaine Neil Orr reflects on her relationship with her body and the aging process, while award-winning essayist Jake Maynard assesses his personal—and our cultural—relationship with the banjo, race, and history in his essay "This American Fife."

In a startling, visceral set of poems, Laura Neal offers readers what she terms a "perspective…across time, space, race and age with an attempt to exploit the 'everyday'", of noting what "often [goes] unnoted." Natasha Pepperl turns her keen eye towards what she calls "Ceremonies of Family", and poets Carolyn Wilsey and Adam Tavel offer ekphrastic responses to works of art.

Of writing her memoir Kin, Rodenberg observes in our conversation that "the mindful preservation of my own history has given me a sense at times of having been made whole again, or of things being 'set to rights,' as my mom used to say." That, too, might describe where many of us find ourselves with our kith and kin—questioning, asserting, embracing, loving, leaving, renewing—now, certainly, but always.