It was back in April of 2023 that I was first approached by The Seventh Wave with a proposition to help pilot the Community Anthologies program. Back then, with my limited scope, I simply jumped at the opportunity to help amplify more voices, and to do so by freely obsessing over a single word, and inviting others to do the same—to wax poetic over whatever fun and interesting theme would become the subject of my call. But it would all become so much more. With every subsequent phase of this process undergone, a new layer of sinew, muscle, and flesh was added to the skeleton of my dream. And with every new voice added to the choir of my ruminations, my vision was infused with impossibly more breadth than I alone could have ever achieved.
Among the voices presented in this anthology are an Afro-Caribbean scholar dedicated to revivifying Haitian lore; a first-generation Nevada-born witch reclaiming power from the depths of intergenerational trauma; a Seattle-based museum editor exploring how art—or sometimes the absence thereof—changes people; a Filipina/-American/Mestiza poet investigating what lives in the negative spaces of erasure; a mother-of-two and Philadelphia youth English educator interrogating the liminal space of life after loss; a synesthetically-gifted visual artist and poet-slash-novelist demystifying the unseen; a multidisciplinary artist, critic, film director, and Cape Town transplant capturing tenderness and precision both through a lens of intimately-lived experience; an award-winning West Coast sculpturist creating emotionally affective art at the nexus of tension and fragility; and a queer, nonbinary, plant-obsessed poet whose work boldly deconstructs parenthood “norms.” To the naked eye, these identities may appear disparate from one another—and yet their work (poems, hybrid pieces, essays, art, and short stories) sings in collective harmony, joined together—in community—across time and space by the evocation of a single powerful word: permanence.
I couldn’t have chosen the word “permanence” back in late-summer with even the faintest idea of all to come in just a few short months, and yet its relevance remains as timeless as time itself, a container perfectly suited to hold it all: the ebbs and flows, knowns and unknowns, and the joys and griefs of the limitless human experience. And while permanence is far from a tangible thing, I am in awe of the manifold ways in which its concept operates as a portal, a gateway, a touchstone, to the most tangible beliefs, experiences, and memories we hold. Even in the same breath as we mourn loss and change, we are presented the gift of reflecting on the everlastingness of their impact in our lives. I hope “On Permanence,” with all of its reflections, resonates with you. I hope you feel the embrace of its community, and that you are renewed by what lives and flourishes within it. More than anything, I hope the stories, words, and works of art you’ll find here will be a gift that permanently and forever changes you.
“On Permanence,” call for submission
This is the call for submissions, which is what the published contributors submitted work toward:
Maybe you are like me, and you’ve been thinking a lot about permanence. How the things you grew up taking for granted, or believing in their everlastingness, have vanished—or changed irreparably, unrecognizably. Maybe for you, this sense of permanence is inextricably connected to the memory of a once-nuclear family, a long-held dream, a deeply-rooted belief, or an irrefutable understanding of your rights as a citizen of this more-than-human world. Maybe “permanence” is tied to a person or object that promised to be a constant in your life even as you grew and changed. Maybe permanence echoes within the rigid constraints of a now ill-fitting label, or in something a birth certificate or diagnosis proclaimed your body, a living vessel, could or could not be (or do) as long as you lived. Or maybe your sense of permanence is tied to your understanding of the power, importance, and (im)probability of permanence itself. What happened when this notion made contact with reality for you? Did time and other factors strip away its weight? Or did you discover something else entirely—which is to say, were you brought to believe that some things truly are infinite and indefinite, can never be changed or revoked, that even what you can’t take with you from this world will remain a legacy, an energy, an uncorruptible force carried forward? If you, too, have been thinking about permanence, tell (or show) me about yourself: words or art that is permanently, impermanently, chronically, terminally, always, no longer, forever, you.
