Dear lovely readers,

As regular readers of F(r)iction will know, this Editor’s Note is usually penned by our Editor-in-Chief, Dani Hedlund. This time around though, I’m popping in—Helen Maimaris here, at your service.

Why the change, you might ask? Well, before I get to the moment I hung suspended in the Pacific Ocean, tears filling my diving mask as I gazed upon my very first manta ray, let me introduce myself.

I started life at Brink—F(r)iction’s parent nonprofit—nine years ago as a wee publishing intern; by the time you’re reading this, I will have been one of Brink’s C-Suite Executives for seven years and F(r)iction’s Managing Editor for five. I live in the UK, and I’m a British-Cypriot mash-up (which mostly means that 1) I’ll likely accidentally slide the word “bloody” in here somewhere, and 2) I tan at the speed of light and think oregano and olive oil goes on everything). I’m an obsessive consumer of potatoes, love tropical heat, and am a confusing mix of simultaneously hyper-organized and pretty slapdash. But really, a vast proportion of my personality can be summarized by my two great passions: storytelling and the ocean.

Firstly, storytelling. As a child, I was most definitely a bookworm (so much so that interaction with other humans sometimes felt like an unnecessary hindrance, I mean honestly). No wonder really that I’ve spent my adult life working at a storytelling nonprofit. At Brink, I have the incredible privilege of overseeing our education programs that harness storytelling to transform the lives of our students, editing work with immensely talented authors, mentoring our senior staff team, and guiding our nonprofit’s vision and mission alongside one of the humans I most admire in the world. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every day, when I sit at my desk, I feel that same, intense pull that I get from reading, moments of joy akin to the breathless suspension of turning the first page in a book, the whole world falling away as your imagination lights up.

My love of the ocean plays out in seemingly less evident ways. It’s so core to me that I honestly don’t know when it began or why, but I like to think the spark was lit when I was just eight months old. My parents took me to Cyprus for the first time, ostensibly for my christening, but it was a baptism of a different kind that became pivotal. On that trip, I was dunked into the Mediterranean for the first time and that was that. Deep-Med blue is my favorite color, I’ve done volunteer scientific fieldwork in Ecuador with humpback whales during the mating season, I have been a professional-level scuba diver since my early twenties. I’ve dived with sea lions, manta rays, bull sharks, grey sharks, reef sharks, turtles; I know firsthand how the shifting mirror of the ocean opens up like a portal as soon as you drift past the surface and downwards, and that whether you’re exploring a shipwreck, gazing at the intense detail of a living, breathing coral reef, or drifting along in a current looking down into the deep deep blue, the ocean will never ever fail to awe.

So, when Dani suggested a couple of years ago that we curate an Oceans issue, I was ecstatic. Attentive readers may have noticed an odd trend in the artwork of previous issues—for years, the art direction team has been sneaking ocean details into F(r)iction illustrations, purely to hear my cries of delight when I spot them during our production meetings. Just one example: check out the space whales floating through the recent Dreams issue.

Then Dani proposed that I write this Editor’s Note and maybe mention her personal favorite ocean anecdote of mine. Share the magical moment when, on precisely my 194th dive, I first saw one of the most bizarre and beautiful animals imaginable after years of nurturing a, quite frankly, desperate longing to see one.

It was December 2019, and I was part of a small group diving a rocky site off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. We were near the end of our dive and thinking about surfacing soon when, from the hazy blue off to our left, a single, female manta ray emerged. She was huge, several feet across, and her fins moved gracefully up and down as though flying. The visibility wasn’t the best, but I could clearly see the lobes at the top of her head curving down in front of her mouth as her right eye tracked us. She circled our group once with a vast slowness before disappearing back into the mineral gloom. I realized then that I was crying into my mask—which, if you were wondering, is not where water goes and complicated seeing the actual damn, gorgeous thing. I’ve had the privilege of diving with many manta rays since, had a pregnant female pass just a meter above me, even floated in the midst of a “train” of tens of mantas. But something about that first teary time has stayed with me ever since. As the well-known saying goes, you never forget your first manta.

This is all to say that once Dani suggested I be the one to write this note, I thought, hell yes, I can’t wait to share my obsession with our readers to help frame the amazing content in this issue.

In these pages, we move around the globe to bring you poetry from a tsunami survivor; a feature from the eminent marine biologist, Dr. Ocean, illuminating the power of sunlight in the sea’s ecosystems; and a story exploring the ancient Vietnamese Con Rồng, or water dragons. We bring you a future world flooded after the waters rise, sci-fi that tracks a probe as it lands in the ocean of one of Saturn’s moons, a story delving into a DNA process that allows us to keep the ghosts of extinct animals alive, and a comic reimagining mermaid folklore. There’s also a feature showcasing work from several amazing storytellers over at Ocean Culture Life, an incredible nonprofit that brings people together from around the world to create an ocean community.

When I reflected on all these pieces, considering how they each explore the ocean through a different lens—whether fearful of its power, intoxicated by its vibrance, or turning to it as a beacon of hope—I realized that this diversity of experience was interwoven with one clear similarity: all these pieces surge with a deep, inexorable pull, a creative expression of the profound connection and undeniable fascination we humans have with the intense, shifting blue that surrounds us.

Safe to say, not only am I bloody proud of this issue, I’m also so excited to share it with you all that I can practically hear you oooing at the gorgeous art as you flip through these pages, despite the fact that I can safely assume, for the vast majority of you, we’re separated by a least a channel, or perhaps a sea, or most likely, a vast vast ocean.

And when I say separated, I mean connected. And when I say connected, I invite you into a moment of collective imagination: here we all are, wetsuitted up, tanks on our backs, hanging weightless in the blue, with the busy metropolis of a coral reef just below us, or perhaps the long fronds of a kelp forest surrounding us. We look up to see the wavering glow of the sun hanging above the surface, beams of sunlight cascading through the water like chandeliers. And in this moment, just like turning the very first page of a book you can’t wait to read, giddy with the joy of diving into the worlds within, everything is perfect.

Cheers,

Helen Maimaris
Managing Editor

Dear lovely reader,

To understand our fascination with gods, please step with me into this handy-dandy time machine I’ve conjured. We’ll press a few impressive, sci-fi, glowing buttons—beep-boop—and gasp as the metal craft shakes, hurling us back in time. Three thousand and twenty-four years fly by—and many, many miles, depending on where you’re cracking open this tome—and we’ll step out onto the dusty roads of Ancient Greece.

At this time, Athens is the peak of civilization (in the West), the birthplace of society, of democracy, of philosophy. Sure, the Indus Valley and Mayans were arguably more technologically advanced (thank you, actual flushing toilets and intensely complex timekeeping!), but what was special about the Greeks is that they were one of the first civilizations that wanted to find answers to everything, from how the elements mixed in our bodies to where knowledge comes from. They were thinkers, philosophers, scientists, sociologists, psychologists—all the things we hail as highly intellectual, highly grounded in fact and method. And in terms of lasting influence, man, they kicked ass and took names. Everything from modern-day democracy to the first concepts of atomics (the idea that stuff is made of littler stuff that we can’t see) and heliocentrism (that our planets revolve around the sun) was influenced by these toga-clad thinkers.

But at the same time as this science was on the rise, faith—what we’ve been told is the antithesis of science—not only thrived but also was needed to make everything else work.

For example, let’s strap on our sandals and wander up the rocky pathway to the Parthenon. It’s not in ruins.

The roof is intact and painted gloriously. The Ottomans haven’t used it to store explosives that “accidentally” go off. It’s beautiful, a sixty-two-foot-tall acropolis overlooking the city full of sun-bleached roofs.

Rain starts to patter on the stone. A storm is coming. Now shudder with me as a bolt of lightning blazes through the sky, scaring the bejesus out of us both. Someone beside us mumbles, “Zeus must be angry.”

Our modern-day brains are tempted to judge this person. Surely for such an advanced civilization, a big old shirtless god in the sky tossing lightning bolts feels foolish… but let’s think about where science was at the time.

Advanced as they may be, the Ancient Greeks have no understanding of weather patterns, of the cool air in the clouds that conjures rain, of colliding positively and negatively charged particles creating flashes of light to carve open the sky. They know only what they can observe. They see enough to know there are four seasons but not why some years are wetter than others. They can observe a healthy body corrupting, but they have no microscopes, no way to understand the many, many ways we can decay on a cellular level.

You see, the Greeks are smart, they are method-centric, they believe in logic… but when there are that many question marks, logic simply doesn’t cut it.

Without modern-day physics, chemistry, astronomy, if you look at the sky broken open by a bright, blinding light and a crack so loud it shakes your bones, what explanation makes more sense than god?

And, for the Greeks, a whole pantheon of them! Don’t understand the movement of the sun? It’s Apollo, dragging the sun along behind his chariot. Are your crops doing better than your neighbor’s? Well, Demeter just likes you better. Are you struggling to get pregnant while your sister can’t seem to stop? Better get your ass down to the temple and pray to Aphrodite.

Like the Greeks, most ancient civilizations used gods to explain natural phenomena that people could observe but not fully understand. Gods, you see, have always been a convenient Band-Aid we toss over anything we just don’t understand. But more than that, in Ancient Greece, science and religion are, in many ways, one. They aren’t competing for dominance. Instead, they team up to explain the biggest, most complicated elements of our world.

But, of course, like any powerful coupling, science and religion were bound to break up.

Now let’s jump in our time machine and cruise forward to the first century CE and the birth of Christianity. For anyone who’s studied the history of religions, you’ll be sick of talking about how much Christianity disrupted the entire field, but think about it: before Christianity, almost all the major faiths’ pantheons— certainly, Greek, Roman, and Norse—all had warrior gods, gorgeous, sexy, capricious bastards who only took a shine to the most magnificent of mortals. The Achilles and Minamoto no Yorimitsu of the world. The 1% of the 1%. Only they mattered to the stars of the big soap opera in the sky.

Those religions, dear reader, were not made for the masses. They were made for the few. Not everyone, after all, is invited to dine forever in Valhalla.

But then, here comes Jesus, who loves you just the way you are, every last one of you. And you don’t need to be great—in fact, being great might be quite bad for you. The meek, he tells us, will inherit the earth.

Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity all share this ground-breaking idea of a God who loves anyone, anyone, who is devout, who follows divine laws, and who loves and celebrates their religious values.

These religions no longer try to explain natural phenomena, largely because society was starting to get a grasp on them. During the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, science had at least some explanation for the movement of the stars, for weather, for the human body. Certainly, it wasn’t always right—Earth as the center of our solar system, leeches pulling toxins from the body, flies spontaneously manifesting—but an authority figure could stand before you and deliver an explanation that lined up with your lived experience.

Instead, the question mark centered on the unseen world: Do we have souls? Where do we go after we die? How should we live?

And man, oh man, did the birth of modern-day monotheistic religion tell people all those things and more. Not just how to live and die, but who to love, who to hate, who was worthy of forgiveness, and who was too far gone. Across the globe, religion became one of the most successful forms of government, of community, of moral order.

And suddenly, the days of the Greeks were over. Faith and science didn’t work hand in hand to help us understand the world. They were enemies, destined to battle it out to the end. And so began the wild escalation of murdering scientists and philosophers. Of “Us versus Them” thinking. Of holy wars and the massive, massive, money-making machine of the church.

Let’s skip over the dozens of centuries of religious wars and blood-soaked battlefields and cruise right back to the modern world of Starbucks caramel macchiatos and smartphones. Statistically, in the West, religion is losing its hold. In America, less than half the population reports being religious, with 20% considered devout, weekly churchgoers. Europe is even lower, with only 40% identifying as religious.

Every decade, these click a little further down.

Of course, there are strong exceptions beyond the West, with South America, Asia, and the Middle East still largely identifying as religious, but from the places where most of us are reading this Editor’s Note, it certainly looks like science is winning the war. And that a deep exploration of gods—say, in a lovely little lit anthology like this one—is growing less and less relevant with each passing year.

But, let’s face it, I just accidentally wrote four pages about the history of gods—and I’m not even at my favorite part yet! Because no matter what the stats about the decline of religion tell us, we are, as a people, fascinated by it. Look at the best-selling fantasy novels of the last fifty years: Circe, Percy Jackson, The City We Became, Dune, Good Omens. We are fascinated by the idea of the divine, from police procedurals starring Lucifer to Bruce Almighty generally sucking at playing god.

So, as with all issues of F(r)iction, we listened to our readers, our students, and our own passions, and started putting out calls for submissions about gods. As a lover of world religions, I expected lots of retellings, wild fantasies where old gods try to walk among us. Or perhaps new gods who mimic what we fret about today, Gods of Instagram and our nightly worship in front of our God of Televised Entertainment.

But like every issue, I’m always surprised by what our community conjures. A first glance at this content will show a big fascination with death—in many ways, a question mark that makes even the most devout Christian or fervent atheist hold a sliver of doubt. From a ride-share app for ghosts to complete their “unfinished business” to a pastor using crazy sci-fi tech to find a way to die that won’t destroy the faith of his flock, death was everywhere.

It’s even seeped into our “In-World Interview,” in which bestselling author Neal Shusterman is interviewed by his own characters from his Arc of a Scythe books, a rad sci-fi series in which a god-like AI has cured all the world’s woes, including death… but in a world without death, someone needs to keep population growth in check, thus introducing a world of modern-day Gods of Death who can “glean” a select number of the immortal humans.

There were also far more works rooted in modern-day Christianity than I expected, including creative nonfiction grappling with the guilt and pressure of standing strong in that remaining 20% devout church demo. We’ve got poetry, essays, and stories that bravely explore contrasting belief systems and how damn hard it is to balance joy and obedience.

And, of course, there are some profoundly hilarious pieces too. I’m particularly tickled by the opener feature by F(r)iction alum K-Ming Chang, exploring how gods evolve to stay relevant, and an utterly fantastic comic by Kieron Gillen in which two tech bros try to disrupt the oldest industry out there… badly.

However, of all the pieces in this journal, the one that takes gods and makes them so deeply human and relatable for me is “Good as God,” a comic memoir from one of our justice-impacted students.

You see, when this theme was just a random thought, I brought it up in one of our Frames Comic Program courses last year. We were teaching a class for formerly incarcerated and justice-touched folks, particularly those with felony drug charges. As it turns out, our students spend a lot of time thinking about God, not only because many of our students are religious themselves, but also because selling drugs is its own form of god-like power. Many of our students were high up in the trade—big money, big influence, lots and lots of worship by their communities… and goodness me, does that sort of power leave a mark.

The class discussion was a Great Flood of questions: How do we redefine ourselves without this power? How do we fight the temptation to go back? How do we accept that there is something or someone bigger than us, and will that make our lives better?

And as our students started delving into their own turning points—moments in their lives when their choices most deeply impacted the trajectory of their lives—one of our students, Jaron, was particularly drawn to the theme. You see, Jaron was writing about growing up in his father’s drug empire, but he was struggling to really land what it was like to feel so in awe of that power, so taken by it even when it killed those he loved.

I won’t ruin the memoir for you, dear reader, but as one of his teachers, I can tell you that the lens of Greek mythology finally helped Jaron express what it was like to be split between his father’s powers and his legit family, a demigod torn between two worlds.

And as I watched Jaron and the amazing artist, Shan Bennion, bring this memoir to life, I thought again and again of that time machine we traveled in. Of the question marks in my students’ lives that they needed gods to answer.

In fact, in all the stories, essays, and poems in this issue, that same lesson applies. Gods—whether of a mystical power source or the power we find within our mortal reach—are still the go-to answer when we can find no other explanation. When our senses fail us. When logic breaks. When the microscope just can’t zoom in anymore. When there is a question mark, God lingers.

And as you read these stories, looking for the question marks in each work, wondering about the question marks in your own lives and experiences, I wanted to leave you with one last mini-jump in our time machine… This is only a wee step back, to the 60s.

Science is having one hell of a heyday, the world marveling as science fiction finally becomes fact. We’re sending people to the moon, “discovering” quarks, inventing things that will shape our modern world: weather satellites, video games, robots. And, as a result, religion is starting to get pushed around. Creationism starts to be replaced with evolution in school curricula, and the world starts to change.

But then… something happens. A crack in the trend.

It starts with the split electron study. For those non-science nerds out there, this theory purports that an electron can exist in multiple states (wave and particle) until it is observed. If you haven’t heard of that, you’ve surely heard the thought experiment that popularized it (Schrödinger’s Cat, in which a cat and some murder toxins are put in a box… and until we open the box, the cat is both alive and dead).

Now this might seem simple, but this idea—that something needs to be observed to actualize—is actually pretty earth-shattering.

Now, of course, most people believe in the Big Bang. Hydrogen, helium, and lithium collide in the universe, and suddenly, stuff exists. Atoms, elements, planets… life. It all appears as a powerful chain reaction, when just a millisecond beforehand, we had empty space… certainly there was nothing “conscious” kicking around in that oblivion. Something from nothing.

If we are to believe modern-day science and accept two facts: one, that the Big Bang happened, and two, that everything needs to be observed in order to happen… there seems to be only one explanation.

Something with consciousness needed to exist when there was nothing… and this thing needed to “watch” the Big Bang happen. But science has no way to explain what or who that thing is.

You see, dear reader, another question mark formed in some of the most advanced scientific minds… and we all know the best fix for a big, old question mark…

So, science invented a “first observer,” some being that witnessed the start of the universe, somehow living outside of time and space (sound familiar, dear reader?). This theory, that observation is needed for everything to transition from the “possible” to the “actual”—called the Copenhagen Interpretation—is currently the most commonly adopted explanation by the scientific community to explain how the quantum realm functions. Think about that. The smartest, most skeptical minds in the world, with the most knowledge, openly adopt a theory that needs a “first observer” to work.

Reminds you a bit of our first time-traveling adventure, does it not? When we looked up at the cosmos from Ancient Greece, and lightning couldn’t be solved just with science or religion… we needed both.

And as you read these amazing stories, dear reader, I hope you remember how much humanity’s question marks have changed… but also, how much they haven’t. And I hope you discover your own question marks and think about how you best can find those answers.

Cheers,

Dani Hedlund
Editor-in-Chief

Dear lovely reader,

You thought this editor’s note was gonna be about comics. But you’d be wrong. It’s about tampons.

Specifically, about the instructions on the back of the tampon box.

You see, dear reader, I struggled to read growing up. The letters were more interested in wiggling around than being deciphered. Phone numbers were impossible to remember. I couldn’t spell anything to save my life. Little b’s and d’s conspired to look identical. Beads of sweat formed on my forehead at the mere mention of reading aloud in class.

Stubbornness became my strongest ally. Dani Hedlund, I told myself, wasn’t going to admit she couldn’t do something, that she had a problem. She was going to be just like everyone else, and even if she wasn’t, if she was “behind,” she was just gonna fake it ‘til she made it.

But having not cracked reading by the age of twelve—and having gotten past the humiliation of being the one kid in my class who went to special ed—I started to think I could just live without the skill all together. My little town was too small and too poor to have a proper special ed teacher, to even know what the word “dyslexic” really meant, so I’d instead been branded with the title “slow.” Well, by the teachers anyway. My peers had other words for it.

So, the game became not about learning to read, but about pretending. I’d mastered asking my dad to read my homework to me at night, memorizing anything I might need to “read aloud” in class. Not to worry my parents, I would sit between them as they read in front of the roaring fire and stare down at my Goosebumps books, carefully turning pages when they did, eyes running back and forth over meaningless words.

And really, the pretending wasn’t that hard. Sure, my grades weren’t great. Despite studying all the time, I lived in a world of Cs. And yeah, I dreaded school, dreaded failing, dreaded the sympathetic looks of my teachers even more than the mockery of my peers, but hell, it was just school. How much did school even matter? Like my parents, I wasn’t planning on going to college. Just the thought made me feel nauseous. No way I’d willingly subject myself to four more years of torture.

But then, everything changed.

In the locker room, I heard about a girl in my class getting her period. And although I hadn’t yet, I panicked. Later that night, sitting on the floor of my parents’ bathroom, I realized my hack of having Dad read things to me wasn’t going to work this time. I remember staring at my mom’s pink tampon box, trying over and over again to make the letters form words, to make those words form sentences. To understand what the hell those sentences meant.

I was so sure they would explain away the horrifying black and white diagrams on the box (so much scarier than the illustrations in my Goosebumps books), that the words held secrets to being an adult, to being independent, that I just couldn’t unlock.

And I started to wonder: How many other things would there be like this? Things I wanted to know privately? Or what about the times I needed to read something, and my dad wouldn’t be there? In a small farm town, we didn’t really have street signs—or, well, streets—but the city, what if I wanted to move there some day? Surely, I would need to read the signs? Figure out which bus goes where?

Soon the tampon box was even harder to read, my tears making the wiggling letters even wigglier. And like those letters, I felt the promise of independence grow blurrier and blurrier… until I couldn’t see it at all.

A few days later, I knocked on my Dad’s office door, where his bear of a body was hunched over the table, glasses slid down, nose nearly touching the fly he was tying. Dad tied the best prince nymphs in town, always eager for a break to take us fishing. But when he couldn’t get away—which was most of the time—he’d sit up in his office and stockpile flies, like a man who longs to travel but can only pack bags he’ll never take to the airport.

“What’s up, pumpkin?” he asked, not looking up.

I don’t know why I didn’t go to my mom about this. It was a girl thing, after all, but my mom was always so put together, never a wrinkle on her pink blouse, never an eyelash uncurled, and I feared that perfection. Someone like me would never be able to live up to that standard.

But Dad? Dad was messy, funny, weird. His hair was always wild, like he’d been driving with the windows down. His Hawaiian shirts were often buttoned incorrectly, flip flops held together with electrical tape. And it wasn’t just his appearance. Dad didn’t think or talk like the other parents. Dad thought Dune was way better than the bible, that lightning storms were better than the movies, that school would never be as important as the Rolling Stones and a great mayfly hatch. Surely, he wouldn’t judge me.

“Dad, I… well, the thing is… ”

“Take your time, kid,” he said, finally looking up to see me blushing. “And hand me some thread.”

“Which color?”

“Surprise me.”

I walked over to the wall of thread spools, all neatly organized, a rainbow of possibilities. Dad knew that always calmed me. The colors. Being creative. Not having just one right way to do something.

He also knew that talking was easier for me when I had something to do with my hands, when I didn’t have to make eye contact.

“I think… I’m… bad at reading,” I finally confessed.

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, the words… I… they don’t stay still. I can’t… I don’t understand them. They hurt my head.”

“All the time?”

“Yeah.”

I heard him lay his tools on the table, click, click, then the creak of his chair as he sat up straighter.

“But your Goosebumps books?”

I swallowed, fingers shaking over a bright yellow spool of thread. “I’m just… looking at the pages.”

“But… you seem to genuinely enjoy them? I’m always looking up and you’re smiling.”

“Oh, yeah… I’m, ah… I’m making up the stories in my head, from the illustrations.”

“But you aren’t reading the words?”

I could feel myself tearing up, shame burning through me. I remember being so sure my dad could see my whole body blushing, the skin on the back of my neck like a red stop light. Turn back. Go no further, the sign said. This girl is stupid. Worthless. Unlovable. Stop before you get tangled in the wreckage.

“How long?” he finally asked.

“For… ever. Always.”

“Hmm.”

I remember how long the silence felt. Endless. Finally, I heard him stand up, walk over. I was too afraid to turn around, to see how disappointed, disgusted, his face would be. Something lifted in front of my line of sight: the nymph he was tying. I remember its fluffy gray body woven around the hook with a little green feather coming out the back, like a bird’s tail.

“What do you think?”

I knew the question wasn’t about the quality of the fly (Dad was the best) but about the color to add next. Fish aren’t entirely color blind, but the conditions of the water affect how their sight has evolved. Freshwater fish, like trout and salmon, can see reds, oranges, blues, and greens, and you want to make a fly that catches their attention.

I looked from the fly to the wall of threads, carefully selecting a burnt orange and then a shimmery, metallic purple. “Orange first, on the body,” I said. “But maybe a stripey layer of purple on the very top? So they get to see the glitter, and we get to see the cool colors.”

“Magic.” He took the thread, and unlike me, his hands were big enough to hold both spools in one hand. “Listen, Pumpkin, I don’t know about the reading thing. Let me think on it. But…” He waited until I looked up at him to finish. “I do know something already.”

“What?”

“You’re not dumb. I promise. It’s like what Mick Jagger said, ‘Different isn’t dumb.’”

A smile cracked on my face. “Did Jagger really say that?”

Dad shrugged. “Probably… at some point. He’s a talkative fellow.”

A week later, I was summoned up to Dad’s office and handed a present. It was summer, but Dad still wrapped it in Christmas paper. Taped to the front was the orange and purple fly with the green tail. When I tore the paper away, revealing the cover of a book beneath, I was instantly disappointed. How in the world did Dad think I’d be able to read this? Was he telling me I was just lazy? That I just needed to practice more?

But then I flipped it open, and there weren’t walls of daunting text. There were illustrations everywhere.

And not the sporadic black and white sketches in my other books, but big, colorful drawings on shiny paper. Some of the illustrations had words in text bubbles or in boxes, but it wasn’t overwhelming.

“It’s called X-Men,” Dad said. Then he leaned behind him to pull out another identical comic book. “I got one for me too, and I thought we could read them and then talk about them. Like a book club.”

“But… what if…”

“It’s okay. The images will do most of the work, showing you what’s happening. But try to work on the words, okay? I think it’ll get easier.”

And it did.

Dad didn’t know any of the amazing research about how comics are an incredible tool for low-literacy and reluctant readers. He didn’t know that the lack of justified formatting of the text makes it infinitely easier for people with dyslexia to read. He didn’t know why I struggled, but he knew that I loved stories, and if I could just find a way to engage with them, to get pulled into the plot and characters, then I would have enough passion to try, to really try, to get past the fear of doing it wrong. To create a system that worked for my brain.

Decades later, when you ask my mom what my struggles with reading were like, she always tells the story of me running through the house, loudly and frantically reading everything—cereal boxes, postcards, the back of her tampon box. That’s always the one she remembers, me standing in front of her in my My Little Pony pjs, reading the entire back of the tampon box like it was Shakespeare.

“It was like a lightbulb turning on,” Mom always says, “and then you couldn’t stop.”

But Mom was wrong. It wasn’t a lightbulb. Wasn’t an “ah-ha” moment. It was a long road. A road paved with brightly colored panels of superheroes. And like my favorite X-Men, Rogue, mastering her mutant powers, it took eons to learn my limits, to practice, to be strong enough to not despair. I learned to look for patterns instead of individual letters, to use the easy-to-identify words (nice short ones) as anchors to more effectively guess at the bigger ones—just as I had used the illustrations to anchor the text in my comics. With a strong coding framework, I could read most words as long as they were in context, even when all the d’s looked like b’s and all the n’s masqueraded as r’s.

But Mom was right about it being impossible for me to stop. Once the passion turned on, I was hooked. For me, reading became a portal to other words, to other experiences. And although it was hard, although it took me so much longer to read anything than my peers, I loved it. Not just to the act of reading. But what it gave me, how it changed who I was. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the scared one, the quiet one, hoping to go unnoticed.

I was the girl with her hand raised in class, the girl who knew the right answer.

And that became addictive, being good enough, smart enough, knowing things. Not just how tampons worked (which, it turned out, was just as horrifying as the diagrams), but also how the world worked. Physics. Mathematics. Politics. The economics of why “spice” was so valuable in Dune. How Winston Churchill conducted meetings in the bathtub. How hard it was for Banner to control the Hulk. How, in all those stories, a single person, with enough stubbornness, could actually change the world and make it better.

It’s not surprising that I wanted to grow up to be like them.

Nearly a decade later, I sat across from a white man in a black suit at the University of Oxford and finally got diagnosed with dyslexia. I remember his shock, eyes moving from my transcripts to my newly printed cognitive reasoning score. I finally received official confirmation that I wasn’t slow, I wasn’t lazy. My brain was just a bit different.

I remember watching his eyebrows furrow, an unspoken question written in their confused curves. “How in god’s name did you get into Oxford?” those eyebrows asked. But he didn’t ask me. Instead, he took
a deep breath, saying instead, “Of course, reading and numbers are obviously a challenge. Anything with sequencing. But you can avoid that.” He picked up a paper before him, presumably my transcripts covered in firsts. “I assume you’re studying… arts? Painting? Maybe dance?”

I smiled, proud, stubborn. “English, philosophy, and maths.”

He laughed because he thought I was joking. I laughed because I wasn’t.

I was in the last year of my degree, and I’d decided to turn down every smart-move job offer to instead keep running a little dream of a nonprofit. A dream of books and storytelling and people like my dad, who looked past the obvious to find the potential hidden within.

I think of my laughter every time I step into a classroom, comics like the ones you’re about to read tucked under my arm. From low-income high schools to max-security prisons, we use comics to teach low-literacy and reluctant students, from dyslexic kids like me to those who have fallen through societal cracks in far more drastic and heartbreaking ways.

These comics don’t just help improve literacy, critical thinking, and communication; they can give us the biggest and most important gift of all: the ability and desire to change the story we tell about ourselves. To be heroes in our own narratives. To discover our own superpowers, to nurture them, to develop the resilience and stubbornness to fight for our future, even when the world tells us we don’t have what it takes.

In these pages, you’ll find nine amazing stories that do just that: make us think differently about the world. All of these works were first published in Brink’s publishing imprint, F(r)iction, a collection of amazing stories, poems, essays, and comics that we teach in all our nonprofit education programs. Spanning nearly a decade of publishing, these original short comics are our favorite and most effective teaching tools, helping students think differently about themselves and the societal norms that try to shape us.

Some stories are fantastical, saturated in family curses, apocalyptic worlds, long journeys to the stars. But, like the X-Men comics I first fell in love with, real themes and hard lessons live beneath the fantasy. Characters explore the difficulties of accepting their bodies, of finding hope in the darkest times, of letting go of the past to carve a new future. We see how caring more about success than the people around us can transform even the strongest hero into a villain, that fear can erode the good in our lives, that accepting our flaws is the only way to embrace our strengths. Others are steeped in reality, like the comic memoir that closes the issue. “Brilliance” came out of our Frames Comic Program, a story from a formerly incarcerated student who spent nearly a year reading and discussing comics with us as he sculpted his own powerful memoir.

For the comic lover, you’ll see some big names from your favorite comics and novels, but the majority of these stories are from emerging and debut talent. New, brave creatives whom we’ve mentored to make sure that the next generation of readers can be inspired by diverse, incredible voices.

I hope, as you read these stories, that you think of your own story. Of the decisions you’ve made that have created the person you’ve become, both the good and the bad. I hope you embrace the parts of you that you love and have the courage to acknowledge and accept the parts you don’t. And remember, above all, that you have the power to decide who and what you want to be. We might not have mutant powers, but we are all powerful. We all have unique talents and perspectives, and we can do truly incredible things with them.

And when in doubt, remember what Mick Jagger probably never said: “Different isn’t dumb.” Different can be a magic all on its own.

Dani Hedlund
Editor-in-Chief

Dear lovely reader,Of the many embarrassing tales that plague my pre-adolescence, few haunted me more than the time I tried to fly. You see, it was rare in my elementary days to get an invite to a friend’s house, as I was, well, an odd child. Imagine bum-length, dishwater blonde tangles and a particular love of wearing my father’s…

Dear lovely reader,

In my eight years at the helm of F(r)iction, I’ve seen some issues come together like magic. Perfect stories shining through the darkness of the slush pile, celebrity authors ringing up at just the right moment, each artist nailing the concept on the first round of sketches. It was enough to make even the most cynical editor believe in the legendary realm of the muses, to see something so difficult come together so easily…

This, dear reader, was not one of those issues.

At every turn, it fought us. Ongoing COVID lockdowns in Shanghai in 2022—where our printer is located—set our production schedule back nearly an entire year. When a piece was locked, it didn’t paginate cleanly. When we found an artist we loved, the timing didn’t work. Again and again, we would get close, and then stumble at the ten-yard line. So badly, in fact, that we had to change the order of the issues we were producing, because the issue due out four months after this one came together faster.

But you know what, dear reader? Doesn’t that just feel right for an issue about the unseen? That an issue about invisibility and marginalization and feeling small in the face of overwhelming odds… of course, it is this issue that would fight its way into the world.

And that is what every piece has in common: the fight. When the world tells you that you don’t matter, that you don’t have a voice, that no one wants to see you, we are all given an option: to stay in the dark or to come out swinging.

But to really explore the theme, we needed, more than ever, to ensure that we pulled stories from authors with a wide array of backgrounds, races, genders, and orientations, each tackling the topic from a wildly different angle.

Some of these works are grounded in reality, from “undesirable” people going missing to invisible diseases—both physical and societal—threating to devour us. And, as in every issue of F(r)iction, this theme is also explored through the glorious lens of the surreal. You’ll find a shirt that promises to finally make you seen and loved… if you never take it off, a young Black girl haunted by her ancestors and the pressure of her legacy among them, and the ghostly consequences of the Texan oilfields.

But it’s not just our written content that brings the unseen into the light. As part of our partnership with comic legend Kelly Sue DeConnick’s #VisibleWomen initiative, we solely hired visual artists from marginalized genders to illustrate this issue, ensuring that this hugely unrepresented group of comic creatives receives the elevation they deserve.

Lastly, a special comic debuts in this issue, one that is very dear to our mission—and to me personally.

For those of you familiar with our parent nonprofit, Brink, you’ll know that as well as publishing this lovely journal, we also teach literacy and storytelling courses in marginalized communities. Fundamentally, we believe that stories have the power to change lives. Engaging with stories allows us to not only develop essential literacy skills that unlock academic and professional pathways, but the act of telling our own story—critically evaluating who we are and why—can also radically shift how we think about our own self-worth and place in the world.

The comic memoir “Brilliance” by Juaquin Mobley was developed in one of our programs. Juaquin’s story was hard fought for and developed through an enormous amount of time, self-reflection, accountability, and courage.

Today, Juaquin is no longer a student but a co-teacher, working alongside us to help other formerly incarcerated people develop the skills and belief to stay out of prison.

If I’ve learned anything from both curating this issue and my years of teaching F(r)iction in communities like Juaquin’s, it is that in order to end the cycle of being “unseen,” you need the courage to step out of the shadows yourself, develop empathy for people different from you, and—just as Juaquin is doing with his work and Kelly Sue is doing with #VisibleWomen—become a force to help others do the same.

I hope, dear reader, that the stories here inspire you, surprise you, and even upset you—because casting a light on unseen people, cultures, and experiences requires us to rethink how the world works, be open to the discomfort of having our own conventions questioned, and be courageous for ourselves and others.

Thank you for being a part of that mission.

Cheers,

Dani Hedlund
Editor-in-Chief

Dear lovely reader,There’s a weighing scale in the locker room of my gym that haunts us all. Throughout the years, I’ve seenpeople step on it and start crying. At the end of a sweat-drenched cardio session, someone will stumble onto it, their eyebrows furrowed at the unmoved number, then limp right back to the treadmill.Gathered…

Dear lovely reader,Two years ago, we did something stupid.As editors and readers, we’d grown disenchanted with mainstream literary journals, with their black and white pages and boring designs. We’d grown weary of the same old stories: always safe, always circling tired and cliché themes.We began to dream about doing things differently.This idea started small: just…

Dear lovely reader,When this gorgeous collection hits the shelves, F(r)iction will be celebrating its first birthday. One year ago, the very first issue popped off the printer, a weird beast full of strange art and stranger stories.Back then, we held that shiny red issue in our hands, and we didn’t care how many people told us it…

Dear lovely reader,When we decided to start this new imprint, we were driven by one idea: we wanted to publish the very best stories, regardless of form, genre, or medium. No matter how controversial, we wouldn’t just publish literary fiction; we’d publish the daring stuff, the works that would otherwise fall through the cracks. We…

Dear lovely reader,Like all great literature, F(r)iction was born out of conflict.In the fall of 2014, my desk was covered with new journals and anthologies, stacks upon stacks of the prose and poetry garnering critical acclaim from the literary world. I was ready to devour the best short-form literature the year had to offer.Two hours later, I…