Echoes exist in hollow  s   p   a   c   e   s.

 

The deep abyss of the canyon.

 

The yawning stalactite-toothed cave.

 

The valley between snowy mountain peaks.

 

Wherever we conjure them, echoes tend to make us feel alone in a vast expanse. More often, our everyday echoes ricochet around the spaces in our lives in simpler ways, like through the aged photo of someone no longer living; an old song that leaps into our mind, time traveling a memory into our present; or when we gaze up at the pale light of stars that burned out thousands of years ago. Echoes tether us to the past while propelling us into the future.

 

Sum stands as an echo of all our lives, as we delve into the world, breathe in, and reflect on the reality in which we find ourselves. Our inaugural issue, themed on echoes itself, has done just that: interwoven threads of narratives to reverberate back a voice born of many different voices. Here, we can experience our individual echoes as a community.

 

In Luce Irigaray’s To Be Born, she skirts the fringes of existence itself, conceiving that each of us have all wanted to be born, and have all decided to enter the world of the living. Whether or not our conception was begun within the body of others, the will to exist is revealed within our first breath. Similar stands with the conception of this journal.

 

The themes we find wrapped up in this issue are enthralling; drawing on the domestic and everyday, overcoming great bodies of water, sometimes on the edge of drowning, fighting against the fringes of memory, grappling with the bare unfamiliarity of places that used to be called home, and more than one of our authors confront the echoes bound within Ouija boards.

 

The transformative nature of echoes, a moment unbound by time, reminds us to continue moving onward. It’s a phenomenon that entwines an act of the past with the promise of the future. Echoes, whether inspiring or harrowing, can connect us. If only we share the echoes of our origins and development, they can feel a little less lonely.

 

These pages welcome the echoes. Bereft of the noise and minutiae that drowns them out or absorbs them to silence, they ring out into existence. And like those echoes, the reverberating and colliding thoughts, inspirations, and work of creative minds can live on.

 

Here’s the to the past propelling us forward, together.