A Letter from Management

Dear Community,

In a moment of crisis during Christmas of 2026, I saw my deceased grandparents in a Jackson, MS, hospital, and behind them, I think, I saw time. Weeks after the injury, they were there in the back of the Honda or there, in my mother’s bedroom as I rested, horrified that sleep would be a dark choice, something like cessation.

My choices were frugal at the time. My visions—the likes of which any intermediate to severe TBI (traumatic brain injury) would expel forwards—were nightmares I had little, besides uninteresting CT scans, private conversations with friends, messages to Mom, to stake my own sanity on. I was sane, but I was traumatized, and realizing in really brutal ways how idiotic my previous complaints had been. The shuttering of my eyes towards Tuesday lunch, activities I’d normally be able to stand in front of were, at worst, things I hadn’t dealt with, demon-y stuff that can and could, in my case, get knocked loose after a brain whumping.

At best, they were sensory changes and a dysfunction of regular dreaming I hadn’t known I was capable of—glad, too, these aren’t fun! During the course of the weeklong event of staples to the back of the skull, I experienced the spiritual lice of my thirty-five years. I have not felt the same since and turn soft eyes towards any encouragements for my convalescence. Active Living! The stuff the Halloween monsters can’t do.

Having dealt in “brain media” for nearly a year and a half at that point, I shouldn’t have been surprised that the sacrifice was a traumatic brain injury. The residual cognitive effects came to me lucidly, and the baths I took to clean the wound were a deeply humbling reminder that vanity loses its cool upon actual bodily accident.

From the traumatic to something assigned: this issue struggles under the weight of a theme that feels too generalized. There is Halloween, then, there are its inhabitants, then, too, its spiritual histories. How do you make an issue about mental health and a holiday and still, with ethos in tact, assemble an argument that the content is reputable? Health writing is generally an unsafe receiver for jokes, and only the most gifted can enjoin whimsy with writing that reaches for academic/seriously creative acceptance. How can the seriousness of illness play savvily with this holiday's symbolism without resorting to gag humor?

The crisis ghost is something I found online and after reading popularizations of famous accounts, I came across summaries of Phantasms of the Living (Apparitions of the Living, Vol. 1 & 2) by Edmund Gurney, Frederic W.H. Myers, and Frank Podmore. There’s something sweet about someone coming to see you when you’re sick.

The notion of souls seems relevant to this issue, feels like something important to illustrate for the spooky-only-purpose of arguing for ourselves. We are amongst friends. A cry for help in crisis pierces religion’s rubber—I mean only to say that we, in these flesh pods, have very little idea of what real need can conjure.

When we’re in crisis, we now have call lines. We have a 988 number and 24-hour-stranger support. National Suicide Prevention Month has passed, but the danger is catching. I worry sometimes about a thought I had, that we’d end up being “a nation of suicides”. Schools and young people, but also women in their middle thirties who, to Instagram, seem to lead rich lives. They can be hurt, too. We richly lead with our media and the filters are confusing to apply reason to. That person behind the application has trauma, too.

I don’t know how you are, but I do hope you’re okay. This issue‘s virgoroso—I hope—will be rich in thought. May the darker aspects of our lives reach Halloween with producible, literary results. I wish only for your continued wellness.

The Issue's Aesthetics:

Survival in the hole and the pink light of the future. The alien landscape of your living past or living past your “retention”. We’re here for a set amount of time, and as a neurodivergent woman, I’ve noticed that many areas of living have been prohibited due to my own frailties. In this incapacitated state, I have found further intelligences in the spiritual.

How about friendship? The phenomenon of the past person, the amigo, the soul-tie, something from God and an avenue, a teaching moment. There’s dialogue with ourselves despite the distance, and sometimes it takes crisis to side-car our realities. Crisis as engine for assistance. Maybe that assistance is a crisis apparition that harkens a decision.

Studying the original intentions for the word krisis, I surprised myself with better understanding of how unreproducible a crisis is to our planes of reality, environment, and fugitive moments of decisive actions towards existence. I speak of Decisions, sometimes the ones made for us by the grand lightning bolt in the sky.

_{... “krisis” could mean a critical point in illness, or the point where the life of the patient is determined. Interestingly, also, independent fields of philosophy bring the two senses condensed to the single Greek word. For example, in the history and philosophy of science “crisis” refers to a situation where the dominant paradigm is unable to reproduce its authority due to a number of empirical anomalies. This stage leads to a more intense criticism, and in decision and judgment making that was not available in the past ...}₍₁₎

In this paralysis of life, I want to value this season of planned endings, and in that goodbye, find what's so difficult about denoting our childhoods a resting place. I just turned 36, and the last year nearly killed me. Childhood was with me for months in the backseat of my car. Weird little things like ballpoint-penned Barbie dolls and bins full of small animal toys. I had a surfboard at one point for weeks before I donated it. I spoke to my childhood and it was wintertime and seeing the things I played with brought on a warm nausea -- my childhood home was being sold -- as my parents stacked their items of 20 years, I played the reluctant babysitter. I did not throw it away. I did not tidy it. I let the forest grow in the back of the Honda and hoped my coworkers didn't look through the windows at my girlhood psychology. We live in our cars and I lived with what I should have thrown away a long time ago. Too long. The length of a short lifetime.

Other lifetimes, let's focus on those.
Those who wrote for this issue are working with memory and the post-education of having lived through it.

Issue's Contributors

Upon beginning the management of this project, it was difficult to find submissions with enough thoroughness of theme to calcify and satisfy our submissions call practically enough to brew the good hope of beginning again at a major topic one could majorly fail. I like an eclectic issue, and I will argue that our choices are rightfully chosen and productive fits for 1. how scary it all is, and 2. our original desire to inspire works that could be traced to a Jungian groundwork.

Those with a scholarly background may privately criticize how some of these pieces undercut Jung's theories, but these theories are why these vulnerable pieces exist in the first place. We lay ourselves on top of the great dinosaur. We write about our PTSD and psychotherapy because Jung also wrote first. Maybe this issue is about the spooky tale of our souls and how they look on paper, but it's also about breaking archetypal casts open, a psychologically lucrative result of the confessional spirit of our contributors' narratives.

These pieces are engaging with the elemental, capitalize on an honest lyricism, and, generously, serve as examples for true and hybrid forms of the essay. They approach health and trauma expositions by appraising performance that better artistically establishes ours and our loved ones' own hurdles. Both our nonfiction and prose represent crises and how difficult a definition it can be to exercise on personal experiences, handled with the cautious hands of writers searching for answers they'd previously missed.