Dear Readers,

And we are back, or perhaps we never really left—the werewolf creeping in the margins of a text, rustling about in our swampy consciousness. We might think of the rougarou as a state of mind, something that connects us in our weirdness and absurdity even when we are socially distanced. For our team, this semester increased the social distance as several of us dispersed to various physical locations throughout the United States. Maybe we’re less connected, or maybe the rougarou is growing. Maybe it’s both at once.

This is to say that we appreciate you, our readership, sticking with us as we continue to figure out how to operate amidst a global pandemic, an economic recession, and various other miscarriages of justice, like the Rittenhouse acquittal, for example. Maybe monsters are just what we need to contend with the ongoing apocalypses, a reminder of the possible in the face of the banality of evil.

So let’s depart from the rational for a bit, mostly because the fiction—or was it myth—of rationality hasn’t seemed to have gotten us very far recently, or maybe ever. Let’s revel in the fiction instead, like what would happen if Garfield was a college student—the subplot of Mae Ashley’s “Bigger Catfish to Fry.” Or consider what socks might show us about intimacy, like in Robin Gow’s “sock-knotting.” And even when it’s not fiction, like Ella Alexander’s creative nonfiction essay, “Adventures in Jury Duty,” which reads like a necessary revision of 12 Angry Men (trigger warning: discussions of domestic violence). In these places it seems we find truth that can be stranger than fiction.

Thank you for being with us on this strange and ever stranger journey. May we all become our weirdest selves yet.

Sincerely,
Kym Cunningham and Couri Johnson
Co-Editors-in-Chief