Below you will find the Contributing Editor’s Foreword for each of our literary anthologies (and in some cases we have included the Preface by the Publisher and General Editor)
[These writings copyright Editions Bibliotekos, Inc. - All Rights Reserved]
[These writings copyright Editions Bibliotekos, Inc. - All Rights Reserved]
~
PREFACE to Puzzles of Faith and Patterns of Doubt (2013)
Gregory
F. Tague & Fredericka A. Jacks
This collection begins and ends in the desert, and such a
symbolic setting is appropriate, for the prophet Isaiah tells us that a voice
cries out from the desert. Whose voice? We think of John the Baptist preaching
in the desert and Jesus in the wilderness resisting the devil’s temptations.
Other religious and spiritual leaders have associations with the desert
(Mohammed) or have led people literally or figuratively out of the desert
(Moses, Buddha).
In part, the voice in the desert is our own. What do we say,
and who will hear us? The book opens and closes with first-person narratives,
characters searching for answers, and this too is appropriate: in the spiritual
realm, we sometimes feel the only voice in the desert is ours, and hence the
questions of what to believe and whom to believe in.
The working title for this anthology had been Faith and
Doubt. But the more we considered the spiritual journey we realized that there
is an incessant pattern of doubt always nagging, tearing at one; yet, faith is
strong enough to be seen, to be felt, to be heard. But this faith is like an
incomplete puzzle – there is always one piece missing.
Much of the work in this volume is not religious – the
doubts that strain one’s faith are questions of character, difficulties in personal
relationships, or problems in the family. The puzzle of faith is not really
about God, it’s about the human predicament: our sins, our mistakes, our
failures (and at times our glories) with ourselves and others.
~
FOREWORD to Puzzles of Faith and Patterns of Doubt (2013)
Rev.
David Rommereim
Though
I walk through the Valley of Shadow is a sliver of Biblical poetry that engages
many in the Judeo Christian movement. It touches the heartstring of deep memory
when we wander off into the puzzle of faith and enter the wild nature of doubt.
Even with the persistent menace of a benign atheism that captivates our anxious
culture, the self and other grasp hands. They hold one another and stumble
together over the presentiment of certainty and its nemesis ambivalence. Each
yearns for a difference beyond what is polarized as the real and the
mysterious. Each of us meanders toward a home that seeks to share the awe and
its incense of an abiding confidence.
The
poetry and stories in this wonderful volume shaped by Gregory Tague and
Fredericka Jacks remind me that it was when I said “I believe” that I entered
that thin space between certainty and ambiguity. When I read the stories aloud,
I began to see my faith staring at me like a mirror, with all the wrinkles and crusty
wear that my life has offered.
This
collection animates my little fingers touching the threadbare material of faith
and doubt. These poems and stories remind me of the courage it takes to open my
eyes to the things that give life and allow me to notice what is right before
my face. This observation, I believe, gives us ability to withstand the awesome
experience of mystery and its kindred spirit we have named faith.
Faith
grips the thread that separates the two forces of the soul. One hand embraces the
plot passed to us from the ancestry of faith, generations we have only met in
the common experience of communal living. Another hand grips the delicate
thread that offers the audacity to move forward in the journey even when our
community struggles with the continuity of values and meaning.
In
this volume, you will notice those who have risked observing their living with
the delicate venture into what is other. You will wander in the wilderness of
the pain caused by misinformed choices. You will see those who turn
hallucination into healing. You will enjoy the turning of death from empty
religion into the raw gift of grief. You will pay attention to the packages
offered in the stories that announce the timely gift of reconciliation and
forgiveness; hope from the places of deep pain re-imagined and healed through
the telling. Each describes what is beyond the ordinary, as well as what is
deeper in the vicissitudes of a faith moving well beyond religion and into the
heart songs which religion hopes to honor, but has become limited by its
penchant to be above doubt and beyond mystery.
These
stories and poems are individuals who will surprise you with the divine mystery
and the drama of moral courage sometimes thwarted, sometimes embellished,
always noticed when one stops to read and watch.
~
PREFACE to Being Human: Call of the
Wild (2012)
Gregory F. Tague and Fredericka A. Jacks
We are primarily interested in stories that deal with human
character. Who are we as a species and as individuals? What is our human nature?
While we have constructed, over thousands of years, a vast cathedral of
scintillating, rational humanity, we can be primal and shadowy with visceral
emotions. We can profoundly love and superficially hate. Though we are by
nature social creatures, we can commit acts of aggression (either against
ourselves or others). And yet, quite often, we seek through rituals a natural
peace with ourselves in unison with our family or the larger environment.
What is our evolved human essence? What makes us tick as a
species? At one point in history, as many as ten different hominid species
roamed the planet, but only we endured. There is even speculation that seventy
thousand years ago only a few thousand of our species were alive. Why do we struggle on, survive, build
cathedrals (and yet hurt each other)? Why do we have rituals, and why do we
create and sometimes destroy relationships? What is (in the phrase of one of
our contributors) the human factor? What does it mean to be (simultaneously) a
deeply meditative and a yet a spontaneously feeling human being?
The fact(or) of being human means recognizing that there is
in each of us a call of the wild, however subtle. There is something elemental
in us that lingers. Who hears the ancestral call? Who answers the call? What is
the response of any individual to the force
of being human? For most of our human history, we have not lived in cities but
have developed from hunters and gatherers (roaming in small clusters) into
engineers of sophisticated national languages and intricate cultures. How much
of the old nature lingers in us still? Apparently quite a lot.
We are in a natural world from which we emerged; we are part
of a large universe of nature; and we wrestle with aspects of our own human
nature. Our history is such that we are social creatures who have evolved very
complex emotions not only of sympathy and compassion, but also of jealousy and
hatred. So the call of the wild does not mean running off into the woods and
hunting fish with one’s teeth; it means acknowledging our deeper connections to
the earth beyond concrete buildings, and more importantly, our essential
connection to each other.
There are aspects of our psyche (feelings and instincts) and
of our physical structure (teeth and fingernails) with which we must reckon.
While we have evolved superstructures of civilization, there are darker moments
in our collective and individual histories, mostly (as this volume
investigates) on a personal or inter-personal level. While familial creatures
who create loving bonds, we are also capable of inflicting harm.
For this book we received quite a corpus of submissions –
well over one thousand pages. We have tried to cull from that mass just enough
material to make our literary point, but keep in mind that the stories between
these covers consist of many different styles and voices. Much of the writing
is poetic, magical, contemplative, and even humorous. We are sure that after
having read this small book, you too will be captivated by the question, Who
are we, individually and collectively?
~
FOREWORD to Being Human: Call of the
Wild (2012)
Ian S. Maloney, Ph.D.
Being
Human: Call of the Wild reminds readers of the varied,
wonderful connections and tensions between the natural world and human
civilization. There are many difficult questions posed in the book. Why do we
kill certain creatures while nurturing others (“The Raccoon”)? When do we draw
the line between protecting our property and letting other creatures live and
thrive (“Two Foxes”)? What drives people to kill others to protect their land
(“Through the Wagonwheel”)? This anthology is about the beautiful mysteries
surrounding us in nature. Wondrous images and ideas swirl and circulate through
this book. Gold liquid from beehives flows onto the earth (“Four Liters of Wild
Honey”). A granddaughter (“Potatoes”) plants with her grandfather and
contemplates the passing of life underground into “a formless mass of matter in
which all was chaos and confusion.” A miraculous migration of endangered
butterflies is imagined to be the transfigured form of lost ancestors (“Annual
Migration”). Many of these stories explore the lines cast under the surface of
creation, characters looking for a nibble of understanding to make better sense
of their place in an evolving world. Childhood memories collide with the
progress of time and the varied human attempts to regulate and restrict nature,
as seen in “White Kaleidoscope,” “Suspended Lines” and “Writing on the Wall.”
And yet, the precarious balance of harmony and chaos in the
wild is met with human tenderness, hope, and courage. We travel along with a
spice merchant (“To Zanzibar”) as he leaves the marketplace, his Tower of
Babel, to encounter the far off places from where his spices originate. We
wander away from mundane order into a magical Garden of Eden, where new cities
and universes expand within the human soul through new interactions with minute
particles and new people. We are drawn along through humor and pathos into the
complexity of human existence, our persistent questions and confusions about
our origins, our ultimate place in the universe. Comic interactions abound as
we watch Ida Pilcher come to terms with her vultures (literally) in “Swirling
Above Her Head” and another narrative voice invites us to hear her talking to a
tree in the aptly titled “Conversation With a Tree.”
Ultimately, this volume takes a turn from Jack London’s
pitting of nature against civilization; this is not a survival of the fittest,
nature red-in-tooth-and-claw anthology. Being
Human wonders in the mysterious, and often whimsical, play of humanity as
it interacts with, and seeks solace and identification in, nature. In “The
All-Knowing Eye,” Garland Duckett finds God in the eyes of a Great Blue Heron.
He moves beyond the strictures of his condo committee’s regulations to find
companionship with a woman creating a wildlife refuge in her backyard. Garland
goes on a journey as we do in reading this volume. Nature continues to find a
way to mystify and satisfy us, for it cannot be contained neatly, even as we
try to box it off. As the stories testify, such exchanges aid us in our call of
the wild to be more human, and thus to be more engaged with the world around
us.
~
PREFACE to Battle Runes: Writings on
War (2011)
Fredericka
A. Jacks
Battle Runes
opens in a child’s voice and ends with a child’s concern; the book begins in
horror and terror and ends with care and hope; the collection starts in
darkness and ends in color. The stories and poems – while focused on war –
include private and public spaces, often addressing family relationships, such
as those between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, or parents and
children. While there is blood in these pages, the emphasis is on the complex
psychological dimensions of war. The individual stories cohere around problems
of humanity during war, questions about what is humane and what is inhuman.
Wars touched on in this book (from various perspectives)
include: the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War,
the African Wars (South Sudan, C.A.R., Congo, Uganda), the Balkan Wars, the
Iran-Iraq War, and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In each and every case the
emphasis is on the individual human element, the physical, mental, and
spiritual devastation to people who fall victim to social or political forces
often beyond their control.
Our editorial approach, considering that this is an
anthology of creative writings, has been light-handed: we permit each writer to
speak in his or her own voice, with its own distinctive rhythm, syntax, and
idiom. We are delighted to present this multi-vocal volume and trust that not
only will you find each contribution compelling to read but also will discover
how the book (later) is worth pondering in its cumulative emotional and
intellectual effect.
~
FOREWORD to Battle Runes: Writings
on War (2011)
Wendy
Galgan, Ph.D.
Nations
at war – in a world seemingly always at war in one place or another – can lose
sight of the cost of battle. A people at war find their perceptions obscured,
blurred, obstructed; their focus is too narrow, or too wide. Those caught up in
the rush of warfare run the risk of losing their vision, their ability not only
to see but also to recognize the terrible cost paid by warrior and civilian
alike, by ordinary people facing unbearable losses and witnessing unthinkable
tragedies.
The
collection you now hold is a remedy to this “war blindness.” These authors
possess the remarkable ability to allow the reader to see what they see, to
take an unsentimental and painfully clear look at what war – fighting it,
witnessing it, surviving it – does to human beings. We experience war and its
aftermath through the eyes of victor and vanquished, infantry and insurgent,
parent and child. We are shown how a shell-shocked vet’s “haunted eyes, seeing
the lake, were seeing things none of the rest of us could, or would want to,
see” (“Going Somewhere, or Coming Back?”). How a young German soldier could
look at brutally assaulted women and feel that he “had seen it before and would
see it again” because this is the nature of warfare (“The German”). How when
“time stands still when the bombs drop and the shells strike,” perhaps it does
so because “time, unlike you and me, has nothing to lose” and can stand and
watch (witness, see) what is
happening in the combat zone, which could just as well be in an “open field or
the crowded marketplace or the quiet sanctuary of someone’s home” (“Grief
Echoes”).
This
is a wonderfully varied and extremely powerful collection. We are shown war
(and what comes after) in Iran, Africa, Italy and on the Russian front. We see
an American medic struggling to save the wounded, the effect of World War I
upon a survivor, and shells falling on Sarajevo as a father tries to get his
daughter to safety. We are there, witnesses to each battle, observing not from
the safety of the sidelines but from the very middle of the action. We watch as
soldiers return home to struggle with both the physical and emotional
aftereffects of warfare. And we experience the fear of civilians watching their
world crumble beneath the machines of war.
These
writers are witnesses to the truth of warfare and reveal that truth within
these pages. Read on, and see for yourself.
~
PREFACE to Common Boundary: Stories
of Immigration (2010)
Fredericka
A. Jacks
Once,
after we had picked up our daughter from kindergarten, we found a note in her
bag from the school nurse saying that she had a “speech problem.” The Principal
insisted this was so, that there was a firm diagnosis, and that we should not
delay in seeking professional help. Of course we knew this not to be true and
emphasized to the Principal (again) that our daughter had come to the United
States (nearly four years old) speaking only Lithuanian. For the most part, we
spoke only English. Our daughter had moved from one monolingual environment to
another.
Complications
that arose because of the clash of languages seemed irresolvable. People
continually asked, “How’s her English?” We were also asked, routinely, if she
spoke Russian or Polish – “Isn’t Lithuanian similar?” After a few years, many
of the same people then asked, “Do you think she remembers any of her own language?” A culture is a country’s
language, its customs, and the collective thinking or attitude of the people;
our daughter was a little immigrant who had brought with her an entire culture.
Not surprisingly, there was no speech problem; rather, there was ignorance on
the part of others about the particular word inflections made by our daughter
as she moved from one language to another.
Common Boundary
includes many varieties of immigration stories. The shifting attitude we
experienced over our daughter’s English acquisition (and the loss of her native
language) represents a paradox: on the one hand, there is an attempt to
accommodate someone from another country; on the other hand, the immigrant
person is always perceived as something foreign. There’s a common boundary –
being part of and yet being apart from others.
~
FOREWORD to Common Boundary: Stories
of Immigration (2010)
Jason
Dubow, M.F.A.
In
a post-9/11 world increasingly shrunk by the power of technology and the
possibility of mobility, immigration is as much in the news as it has ever
been. The details of that news – this bill, that crackdown, a bar graph here,
some commentary there – are flat and fleeting. The lasting news, the news that
gives depth to our understanding of the world and humanity, is elsewhere – in
stories, in these stories: these people, these places, these things.
The news is in a young girl’s memory of the “slivers of what had once been her
father’s violin” as she flees Nazi-infected Hungary (“They Set Sail in
Springtime”); the news is the struggle of a Mexican immigrant to make sense
(for herself and others) of a giant Peruvian potato displayed at a Midwestern
state fair (“La Santa Papa”); and the news is in the worried father preparing
to bring his newly-adopted daughter “home” from China “towards [what he
believes is] a future of hope and promise” in Brooklyn (“The Plain Brown
Envelopes”). The news is in the spices, the photographs, and the furniture; the
news is in individual struggles, memories, and hopes.
My
grandmother, Nana Ruth, would have loved Common
Boundary: Stories of Immigration (or, as I persistently misread the last
word of the title, “Imagination”)
because, as an immigrant herself (a Holocaust refugee), she would have found naches (“joy”) in both the familiar (“Wooden Trunk from Buchenwald”) and the
unfamiliar. These stories of immigration (and
imagination) are about people, like my grandmother, who mentally and
emotionally live between places, languages, and cultures. And, really, aren’t
we all a jumble of perspectives? Aren’t we all living somewhere between our
dreams and our reality, between our fears and our desires, between our various
identities? Maybe President Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, at least
metaphorically, when he famously said, “We are all immigrants.” Haven’t we all,
to take liberties with song writers Simon and Garfunkel, gone to look for our “America”?
If
“[being] a foreigner means speaking without being understood” (“Blue Painted
Field”), then the writers here are anything but: they speak and you will
understand. You’ll like some pieces better than others (who knows, or cares,
why). I have my favorites – “Living Between Question Marks,” “An Immigrant’s
Deal” – but I can easily imagine why any one of these pieces might be your favorite. As it’s true that we are
“nothing if not an anthology of our experiences and the places we’ve lived”
(“Beginning in the Midwest”), then this book is really an anthology of
anthologies: a collection of stories in which the old inextricably blends with
the new, in which the tensions between what has been lost and what can be
gained are grappled with (but, inevitably, not resolved), and in which the
human capacity to imagine a future and make it real (more or less) is explored
from a variety of different perspectives. Here’s the essential question: now
that I am no longer there but here, Who am I? The answers, the stories
– various, contingent, authentic – have made me, in a Whitman-esque sense,
“larger,” and they will you too. And so, when you’re done reading, ask
yourself: Who now am I?
~
PREFACE to Pain and Memory:
Reflections on the Strength of the Human Spirit in Suffering (2009)
Fredericka
A. Jacks
When
we first conceived of the theme medical humanities, we anticipated a collection
that would include medical doctors and other health care practitioners. In
fact, we did receive submissions from those directly involved in health care,
but by far the most gripping submissions were those by people without any
medical education – poets and writers who have experienced first-hand the
tragedy of enduring pain and then living through the process of dealing with
painful memory. These writers recall not only the suffering but also the
courage demonstrated by those who are sick and by those who participate in
their illness. The writings consistently reminded us, in some ways, of Paul
Tillich’s expression (and the title to one of his books), the courage to be. In many of these writings the reader will be
grasped by the human need for connection and the desire for existential meaning
when confronted with pain and suffering. In pain we suffer a fear of
non-existence and want to forget, but in the anxiety of forgetting we risk
denying life.
Of
course some of our contributors are marginally in health care – a clinical
psychologist and a nursing assistant, for example – but even so, the writing in
this volume is by far immersed in the sympathetic and empathetic, the literary
art of exploring human feeling, and
not the medical or scientific art of detached observation. Overall, the time
spent reading submissions proved again and again that the emphasis from our
original call should be on the humanity
and not the medicine of pain and
memory – that is what we learned, and so that is what we offer here.
~
FOREWORD to Pain and Memory:
Reflections on the Strength of the Human Spirit in Suffering (2009)
John
F. Lennon, Ph.D.
On
September 24th at 4:22am, with sweat pouring down Liz’s face and a
visible blue vein snaking its way across her temple, my wife poured herself
into one last push, sharply biting down on my hand that tightly wrapped around
hers, while I, with my other hand, held her right leg crooked and roughly
pressed it towards her chest, paralleling a nurse who did the exact same thing
with her left leg. At exactly this same moment, a doctor gingerly grabbed at my
daughter’s head and pulled Abby, awash in fluid and blood, forcibly into the
world. As the nurse quickly pressed tubes down my baby’s throat and rubbed her
body with towels, I anxiously waited in silence until I finally heard it:
Abby’s loud piercing wail. As my wife exhaled and my daughter inhaled, a
scissors cleft Abby from Liz, splitting what was always one forever into two.
As I heard my daughter’s desperate cry, I became aware of something that
everyone who has witnessed a birth inherently knows: we become ourselves in the
moment of that cut.
When
people ask about the birth, I, of course, never tell anyone this. Instead, I
just usually smile. And even when I get into some of the details – the
harrowing taxi ride with the stern Eastern European driver who refused to
unlock the doors until I paid him, the laps around the nurse’s station while we
waited for a room to open up, the (bad) jokes about the art on the hospital’s
walls – I am always retelling a sanitized version of Abby’s birth because,
frankly, I blanch from acknowledging that our first moment of life is filled
with pain. And so my versions that talk around this absolute truth help create
false memories that, while easier to tell and hear, also block me from really
ever remembering her birth in all of its beautiful rawness.
PAIN AND MEMORY
refuses to shy away from looking at those tender moments of pain. Whether it is
unflinchingly writing about the moment of death (“Mack the Hermit”) or trying
to come to grips with the loss of a loved one (“Cartography”) or the reeling
that happens at the end of a relationship (“Heartless”) or attempting to
understand an injury (“After the Accident”) or finding the exact words to
discuss the feeling of being abandoned (“Kiribiri”), this anthology does not
Hollywoodize pain or sanitize its imprint on those who are affected by it. Instead,
these stories pull back the gauze that hides the day-to-day wounds of our lives
and, with surgical precision, allows us viscerally to experience them.
In
the process, what this anthology will allow us to do as readers is revisit our
own stories that we comfortably tell and retell, forcing us to dissect our own
memories under the harsh light of truth. And if we are brave enough to look at
this pain, as these authors do, what we might discover is a strength that
reveals itself at the core of our humanity. After all, if it is true that from
our birth to our death we are wrestling with pain, then, as these stories can
attest, we are also spending every second of this time persevering as well.
