August 1, 2022

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the fifteenth issue of Barzakh! 

The theme of this issue is In Nature, and I cannot think of a more appropriate time to be publishing an issue on this topic. As I write this, forty-million Americans are enduring record-high temperatures. And as journalist Chris Baraniuk recently wrote, “Already 2022 has brought powerful floods, terrifying wildfires, and unusually early heat waves globally—notably those in India and Pakistan, Europe, the US, and parts of East Asia. Freak hail storms have battered Germany and Mexico City, and US forecasters expect an above-normal hurricane season.”

We are living in a time in which human-made global temperature rise is causing the natural world to change rapidly, and if humanity—especially the Global North—does not act quickly, these changes will escalate and continue to wreak havoc on an incredible number of environments and on the lives and cultures of so many human beings, especially those living in the Global South. 

I assume that the readers of a journal like Barzakh know most of this already, so I imagine that I’m preaching to the choir. But I would be happy to be preaching to the choir if it helped the choir to sing that much more loudly and passionately, and I can only hope that this is the effect that the newest issue of Barzakh will have on its readers. 

It has certainly had that effect on me, though I have to admit that I am surprised by just how that effect was made. 

When we chose “In Nature” as a theme, I expected that we would receive a lot of beautiful and impassioned words and works of art about the natural world, our place within it, and our responsibilities to it—and while I was certainly right about that, I didn’t anticipate just how right I’d be. 

Including the work of eighty-seven artists and writers from at least twenty-three countries and six continents, this issue is most certainly our biggest and most eclectic yet, and even this fact does not fully capture the quality of the work we received. As big and varied as this issue is, we still had to turn away so many of the incredible words and works of art that were submitted to us. 

As I was reflecting on this—on all of the powerful work that both did and did not make it into the issue—I was struck by just how potent this theme is for so many artists and writers working today. Humanity’s relationship with the natural world is constantly changing and evolving, but the work we received in response to our call for submissions proves to me that many contemporary artists and writers already have relationships with nature that are animated by awe, inspiration, fascination, empathy, care, responsibility, and reverence. 

For me, this has only underlined what a tragedy it is to see the natural world under assault. One of our contributors, Julene Waffle, begins her essay on forest bathing with an epigraph from the British naturalist Peter Scott that reads, “The most effective way to save the threatened and decimated natural world is to cause people to fall in love with it again, with its beauty and its reality.” I want to thank everyone that submitted to us for helping me to fall even more deeply in love with the beauty and reality of the natural world, and dear Reader, I believe that the work of our contributors will deepen your love for it as well.

But before we begin, a few words of thanks are in order.

First, I want to thank our entire editorial team for the incredible work they did over the course of the 2021-2022 academic year, and I’d like to especially recognize the work done by our managing editor, Christy O’Callaghan, and our editorial interns, Devin Jinadasa and Shirley Chen, when it came putting this most recent issue together.

Second, I’d like to thank our outgoing visual-arts editor, Juliana Haliti, for three amazing years in that position. Juliana recently graduated with their MFA in the visual arts from UAlbany, and we could not be more proud of them for the incredible work they have done and will continue to do.

Congrats Juliana!

Third, I’d like to thank the English Department and The Graduate School at UAlbany for their continued support. Support from the former allowed us to afford Submittable for the coming year, while support from the latter allowed us to attend the most recent AWP conference in Philadelphia. And I’d like to extend that thanks to everyone that attended, performed at, read at, and financially contributed to our first ever Barzakh celebration and fundraiser! All of these contributions are helping us to accomplish our mission of amplifying the voices of artists and writers from around the globe, and we could not be more grateful.

Fourth and finally, I want to thank everyone that submitted and contributed work to this issue. We could not amplify the voices of international artists and writers without international voices to amplify, so thank you for entrusting your work to us. 

I am giddy with pride and admiration for the work that you will find in this issue, so dear Reader, I hope that you will find it as interesting, surprising, satisfying, electrifying, and challenging as I have. 

Please enjoy our fifteenth issue.

C. Connor Syrewicz 
Editor-in-Chief