“The creative adult is the child who has survived.” Ursula LeGuinn

Here at Storyscape, we don’t have themed issues, but themes invariably emerge. So many of the pieces in this issue capture the spirit and vivacity of youth, in more or less obvious ways. Issue Four features our cover artist Adam Auerbach’s quirky and endearing children’s book illustrations, a queer choose-your-own-adventure tale by Caitlin Delohery, and Julie Christman’s hilarious and touching story about giving up thumb sucking (or does she?). David Shapiro’s stunning collages fall in the playful category, while Lesley Weiner’s Curiosity Index, a fascinating miniature book (a book within a journal) about the history of her purple pencil, falls in the quirky category. And then some pieces simply struck us—Kimiko Hahn’s piercing and distilled poetry, Alli Shaloum’s clever play on the genre of confessional poetry. Just to keep it spontaneous, we tried an experiment: Sini Anderson is performing at our reading a week after the journal’s publication, and we don’t know, exactly, what her piece for the journal will be yet. My suspicion is that neither does she. Check out her piece to see what we, the editors, didn’t know yet when writing this editor’s note.

Speaking of editing: collecting the pieces for this Issue Four was an absolute pleasure. Our submitters are energetic, interesting writers and thinkers engaged in both telling stories and considering what stories are. When we first started this venture, our submissions inbox included many confused emails asking what we meant by untruth, and how could a story not have words, and a handful of questions about short-shorts (our mission statement contains a joke about cut-off jeans), but thankfully people seem less confused by us than they once were. Now our inbox is flooded with: submissions. We put a lot of work and energy into building a foundation for innovative stories to emerge. This journal, I’m happy to report, is no longer about us. Enjoy!

-- Anne Hays, editor