EDITOR’S NOTE

Two years of COVID, supply chain breakdown, January 6th, the war in Ukraine, and now the impeding overturn of Roe v. Wade—we’re in the middle of a fast and tumultuous time and things show no signs of slowing down. We are all enduring levels and kinds of stress that were unimaginable only a few years ago, and one of the relatively new but ever escalating ones is our engagement with information.

Whatever media it may come through, our interaction with that information is fundamentally an act of reading and reading is what provides us a connection to the whole spectrum of gradiations between truth and falsehood. Real news, fake news, motivational lectures, educational PowerPoints, propaganda, TikTok, social media, and even the ubiquitious cat videos—the list is endless. In this complex and involuted infosphere, we often forget the simple pleasure of reading literature, which is where people used to go for a glimpse of “truth” and “beauty.”

 “Literature” has a malleable definition typically applied after the fact, but the “literary” is something we can appreciate now, when it is right in front of us. Literary works are things we read for a kind of engaged personal fulfillment we can’t get (or don’t want) from the infosphere or even from the most engaging of sense-stimulating entertainment media. Literary works speak to us with a quieter voice that seems to come from inside; they are texts that connect one consciousness with another in the most profound way as both the professor and the writer will tell you.

So we invite you to slow down. Take a few calming breaths and enjoy the literary work by the writers in our 2022 issue of the Stonesthrow Review. Let it be a reprieve from the other media that are bombarding you even now. Close those other tabs. Obscure your desktop. Ignore your email. Just read. You’ll find it’s well worth your time.

—The Editors