editors’ introductions

From Bella:

Before I was an editor, I was a teacher. I spent lots of time with tiny, silly humans in classrooms designed not exactly for them. I’ve found this to be the case for many things in life—particularly the world, which was not designed to nurture humans of any size, nor their complex emotions and experiences. This is likely why Charlie and I have, many times throughout our creative journey together, felt the need to address our shared aversion to “mushiness.” We, like many people, have not been permitted to enjoy our feelings in all of their messy, uncomfortable glory. This is the way of the world we live in: Uncaring. Cold. Anti-human. This is decidedly not the way of Crayfish.
During my time as a teacher, I discovered a wonderful truth about the profession. When you are working with tiny, silly humans, it is nearly impossible to teach them more than they teach you. They will learn the alphabet and basic addition facts. You will learn to love again, to laugh, to embrace the snottiest and weepiest parts of yourself. You will come back to life in ways you didn’t know you needed. Charlie and I were very fortunate to receive work that allowed us to capture that feeling in this journal. (Double lucky that this happens to be our first edition.) If you and I have anything in common, this issue will make you want to jump into a river, bake a mud pie, run through a field, scream at the sky, hug your loved ones a little tighter. It is our tiny, silly hope that this journal will help mend some of the damage the world has done to all of us. Though, as with all good remedies, there are side effects.
As editors of creative writing—specifically within the context of a small, independent press—we have the opportunity to create a larger message out of the work we publish. Given our current socio-political climate, this edition may elicit a bit of existential dread. In other words, this is our rebellion. It is up to you to decipher what that means. I encourage you to pay special attention to pieces like “Queer Bodies,” “From a Conversation with the Censor,” and “I Wrote a Poem About Whimsy & Tried to Set it On Fire.” In many ways, these pieces have validated my existence in a world where it has been deemed inflammatory. For this, I am so grateful.
It seems appropriate, then, to end this letter with more gratitude. I feel very lucky to have worked with all the humans behind the powerful art in this issue. I deeply admire their work and bravery in sharing it with the world, especially now. Thank you, contributors, for trusting CrayfishMag as a home for your thoughts. And thank you, readers, for making our job worth it. We are so thrilled to share this project with you.

Charlie, thank you for chasing this crazy dream with me. We finally did the thing!

A few weeks back, Bella had written the titles of all our accepted pieces on color-coded post-it notes and we were laying them out in a sequence that let the pieces talk to each other, let them argue or resonate, let them echo. We were moving them around excitedly—sometimes with careful explanations, sometimes with an instant “Yes!” or an abrupt “Nope.” It was the kind of fun you hope for when you sign up for a collaborative project like starting a literary magazine and small press. With the final vision of this website in mind, I wondered if anyone would read these pieces in what I will confidently call the correct and complete order. I wondered this aloud, asking if it mattered even while I was enjoying the puzzle. Bella quickly answered, “It matters to us”—this is how you know you have found the right co-editor by the way.
These pieces do matter to us. How we present them to you also matters.
I expect many readers will look first for a particular author and then, perhaps, browse the table of contents for other familiar names. This is not a crime. However, I do hope folks feel the similarities and differences in how these writers explore what it means to be a human in a body, the complicated legacies of our families and the related grief, the ways we hold and harm one another and the related grief, the way the natural world can heal us or reflect back to us the harm we have done to it. At times these pieces are deeply rooted in place and at other times they feel entirely uprooted. You will also find music, and art, and food, and tenderness, and terror, and a deep love of language. I hope some of you will ride the emotional wave all the way from Bob King’s “Disclaimer” to Jason Harris’s “Good Run”—a poem which chokes me up every single time I read it. All the pieces in between have come to matter to me, and if I start referencing individual pieces now, it will feel like a kind of infidelity. I’ll just advise you not avert your eyes from the roadkill, do not turn off the banjo solo, do not overlook the glowing blue line between rust and indigo, do not entirely ignore the car that seems to be following you on the highway, do not shy away from the difficult work.  
Okay, I got excited and bossy there, and I kind of mean it. Working on this project, on honoring these creators, has been a meaningful outlet during a challenging winter. I wrote those commands in the hope that these pieces and these artists would come to matter to you too. We’re already discussing how the next issue might further this work. Right now though, I am glad you are here, and I hope you make the time to engage with as many of these pieces as you can—in whatever order you want.