Let’s Make Contact | 40.4

2017

Everything I’ve written to date—whether poetry, prose, essays, or short stories—I’ve written with the sole purpose to answer questions and fill space, to fill the cracks in the narrative. Editing this issue of Room was no different.

Kintsugi. The translation from Japanese means “golden joinery” or “to patch with gold.” By using gold with lacquer or epoxy to enhance the breaks in broken pottery, this technique transforms broken ceramic or china vessels into beautiful works of art and gives them new life. In thinking about the “cracks in the narrative,” the Japanese art of Kintsugi gives me a little bit of hope. Broken things can be fixed, made new, made better, beautiful again. The notion of transformation is key to healing from any sort of trauma.

In Ashley Little’s short stories “Beluga” and “The Other Side of Nothing,” she describes small glimmers of hope buried beneath life’s darkest moments in a richly poetic way. When Little says “the sun sparkled off a crack in the windshield, slicing a crystal line across the horizon, and beyond that the clean blue sky stretched out to infinity,” this is exactly what I mean by the cracks filled with gold.

In her interview with Cara Lang, Renée Sarojini Saklikar says she is “remaining curious, delirious about making contact with process, with the inside and outside worlds around me, with others, friends and strangers: to stay true to the work, some days being better than others, still searching for that golden thread.”

“Let’s Make Contact” is about more than reaching out. It’s more than communication, truth, and sharing. It’s about letting go. It’s about transformation. “Let’s Make Contact” is about the constant search and need to make ourselves better.

When you sit down with this issue of Room, I hope you’ll notice the trickling beauty of each piece, worthy of gold in its own right. I want readers to see the cracks, and treasure them.