These days (and in many before them), our world can be remarkably difficult to inhabit, and even harder to love. In order to survive its seemingly ceaseless barrage of headlines and tragedies, we mitigate our exposure—form quick opinions, forgo further questions, and do our best to move on before anything has the chance to penetrate or deepen.
For me and many others, the overwhelm of the past year has resulted in periods of creative drought and emotional numbness. I’ve spent entire months unable to write anything. I’ve wondered if a discipline that requires so much feeling and witness is sustainable in our current social, political, and personal landscapes.
And then I read a poem. A friend recommends a favorite book. I sit with a painting recently submitted to Inscape.
When my own words fail, I turn to yours. To the best and most honest parts of humanity, contained in what we create.
Often, the essential role of literary journals like Inscape is to coordinate our individual efforts to comprehend and celebrate our lives through creative work. We help each other learn to love what we don’t understand. To find real joy in our unique palettes of language and color. To look again, and look closer.
After all, the difference between an ordinary life and an extraordinary one is usually a matter of attention to the intricacies of daily living.
The work we do as writers and artists requires that same attention. Creation is not a point of arrival, but a sustained act—an orientation that demands patience and an unusual attunement to the miraculous everyday. This is, perhaps, the first joy of creating: the recognition that nothing is wasted on a careful eye. The world, which can at times feel diffuse or overwhelming, becomes newly textured under sustained study. Compounded, details gather meaning. Fragments begin to cohere. Even uncertainty—especially uncertainty—becomes generative. A place to linger rather than a place for resolution.
It would be too simple to say that we create in order to feel good, or even in order to make something beautiful. More often, we begin somewhere less certain: with a question, an image, a fragment of language, a feeling we don’t yet understand. We begin because something has caught our attention and won’t let go.
The longer we stay with our uncertainty, the more it begins to change us. It unsettles what we thought we knew. It asks more of us. And in responding to that—through language, through image, through form—we are altered in return.
Before art can change the world, it has to change the artist.
And in that encounter and its resulting change, there is joy. Not only in what is made, but in the making itself. A kind of steady, sustaining joy that does not depend on spectacle or speed, but on presence. The joy of discovering that the world is more abundant than it first appears. That there is always more to see, more to feel. That there is more to have faith in than first meets the eye.
This has been the spirit of our work this semester: the joy of creating not as a distant outcome, but as a way of moving through the world.
In this issue of Inscape, you will find work born from that kind of looking. These poems, stories, and essays do not rush past experience; they linger inside it. They turn things over, hold them up to the light, delight in their textures and contradictions. They remind us that creation is not only an act of expression, but of discovery—a way of encountering the world that is at once attentive and alive, serious and joyful, broken and healing.
The past year has been a remarkably difficult one, and this issue doesn’t shy away from that. Accordingly, it mourns with those who mourn, and offers comfort in the bizarre beauty of its artwork and writing. It reminds us that, even now, there is something to be found, something to be made, and something, always, to find joy in. To believe in.
We hope that reading it fills you with the same joy. That it helps you to believe, too.
Sincerely,
Paige Winegar Fetzer,
Editor-in-Chief,
Inscape Journal
