Dear Lullaby readers,

We didn’t choose a single theme for Issue 002 before opening submissions in June. We were curious to see how people would respond to an open-ended call for work orbiting themes as broad as “grief,” “dreams,” and “the internet.” Now, as Issue 002 comes to a close, we’ve been thinking about what our contributing artists might be saying to each other. Are there specific themes to excavate from this issue retroactively? We sat down to reflect, drawing constellations between work that ranges from candy-colored video collage to watery grief meditation. Turns out there are plenty of synchronicities to be found in this issue’s dream logic.

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Olivia Q. Pintair: This feels like a watery issue to me. There are fish in Angel T. Dionne’s and Rook Rainsdowne’s visual pieces. Malena Ida's and Elizabeth Wing's poems both take place on boats. Nicky Yeager’s photographs bring us to the edge of a creek. Water is physically and metaphorically present.

Maia Sauer: Many of our contributors also share an interest in the power of realistic hope. Kristoffer Tjalve’s reflections on the internet demonstrate an open-heartedness toward the messiness of our relationship with tech. He encourages us to remain attentive and invested in our digital future, avoiding the passivity of blind hope. The internet is already a reality for our kids, he reminds us. We need to figure out how to tend it for and alongside them. Nakinyi Kuruga’s “Rabaut Park,” finds quiet beauty in the mundane working lives of strangers. What if we sat here for a moment, before returning to “the demands of day?” I also love how Aiden Arata explores the ethically gray experience of living and working online.

OQP: Yeah. Each of these artists seems to be looking for a way to blend a sense of possibility or magic with mundane life. That feels like a notable choice in contrast with other options, like writing only through the lens of logic, or escaping fully into a dreamworld where you can forget things like fear or work.

MS: What about the visual pieces? I didn’t have any idea what people would submit and was so excited by the range.

OQP: The first thing I notice is saturation. In Sonali Roy’s and Taylor Elise Colimore's pieces, there are so many earthly images——trees, mountains, flowers, a human body, a dog, a pie——but everything is colored, intensified, and refracted through the lens of digital life. These pieces feel true to our current era of the internet, in which it feels increasingly true that nothing escapes the screen. There is still a restfulness to each of these pieces, though, which interests me. Colimore talks about her film as a meditation on transformation. Roy’s images feel like lullabies in the early 2000s computer game sense.

MS: Right. Is it possible to feel a sense of ease within those saturated landscapes? Can a lullaby be bright pink? Or a collage of neon aliens and trees? These artists seem curious about where to find space and possibility within the overwhelm.

OQP: That's something Ashley M. Jones talked about, too. She said, “writing poems gives me at least some space to be totally quiet. To hear myself, to hear God, and just be very still.” That seems to be a theme in a lot of pieces in Issue 002: the quest to open a temporary autonomous zone of sorts, where rest, dreams, or free-ness is possible and not dependent on the total cessation of chaos.

MS: Sounds like how Mary Eliza describes the role of music: as a way to hold open small portals of connection in a chaotic world, whether through busking in public or listening to a favorite album.

I want to return to the water thread. Wing’s and Ida’s poems find that open space on boats, which shelter them as they engage with oceans of overwhelm and emotional transformation. In the dreamspaces of these pieces, it feels possible to mediate overwhelm with bodily presence.

OQP: I’m curious about where the literal and metaphorical boats in these pieces are headed.

In Elina Katrin’s poem, I notice an aspiration toward sensuousness. The poem considers an embodied dream character whose coat is on fire while she dances, “body sanguine, primal.” It ends with a plea: “let me live/ like that.”

I’m also thinking about our conversation with Arata, and how she talked about seeking nuance. “I was trying to approach the idea of justice from many different angles,” she said about one of the essays in her book, “to say there are so many problems. Nothing is working. That's not to say that justice is not possible, or that nothing works.” Her book feels like an exercise in staying with the trouble, so to speak.

MS: Tjalve’s comments resonate with this. Yes, the co-opted, billionaire-mediated web is scary, but we still have agency. Jones’s comments, too: she urges us to consider what happens underneath the constructed borderlines that divide our purportedly separate experiences. What could we see more clearly when we stand between them?

OQP: At one point in our conversation, Jones said: “There's research that says that [African American Vernacular English] has some of the same grammar patterns as African languages. It’s incredible to me that a people could remake their home in a new language.” Here, the boat is language, and it’s pointing toward home.

Jamieson Webster also speaks to the idea of coming home via breath. For her, breathing itself is a repeated opening——a reaffirmation of our aliveness and porosity to a world in which “real air is becoming a memory.”

MS: Yes. Webster also makes the important distinction that reading is different from life. “Sentences carry us, mediate. Life, more medium than mediated, can brutalize,” she writes. There’s an ask there for us to remember what is real and bodily, to continue to prioritize nuance as we reconfigure our relationships with each other, a warming environment, and digitally mediated lives——even when the collage of competing crises threatens our focus.

And I love Dionne’s surreal call to keep our dreams on “a short leash.” While perhaps a restrictive phrase on the surface, I see a surprising spaciousness reflected in her piece, centering a red fish tied kite-like to a house, ready to catch the wind. What would it mean to keep our dreams close like this, like beloved roommates? Members of our household?

OQP: I feel like there’s a common narrative that dreams are inherently far away. The idea of chasing your dreams, for example, implies that they’re running away from you. The horizon line, the stars, even the glass ceiling——all of these images are colloquial stand-ins for dreams or aspirations as far-off things.

So many of the pieces in this issue, though, seem to affirm that dreams take place much closer to the body: in a quiet moment set aside for writing, in surprising moments of digital connection, in shared breath or conversation, in a boat setting out to sea.