I come from a town that went through a sequence of significant earthquakes. The most catastrophic resulted in almost two hundred lives lost, the destruction of thousands of homes, and (for many) years of uncertainty.
People in my town quickly developed a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with the word ‘resilient’, which often came from outsiders. ‘Resilient’ was usually intended with respect, but could be a label to comfort the unaffected – avoiding the discomfort of suffering, or the responsibility of helping those who did not feel resilient at all.
‘Resilience’ was also missed opportunities. Some actions or inactions, stretching back decades, had a direct link to lives or homes lost. Rebuilding in a way that would actually be resilient for the next disaster was a challenge that felt overwhelming.
And yet people persevered and grew. I saw it. It was imperfect, it was complicated, sometimes it was self-deceptive – things just weren’t going to be ‘back to normal’. I felt it myself — a hard, tough shell growing around a soft center. That shell has served me well, but sometimes it needs to be cracked open a little to let the warm thing inside spill out.
We are grateful to our authors who have, yet again, shown us that every theme brings a richness of experience and imagination into our inbox. You will find a little bit of resilience in all its diversity here.
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Resilience is also a timely theme for us here at Halfway Down the Stairs. We have some big changes coming — and we are particularly sad to farewell some of our editors with this issue:
Thank you to Sherri Miller and to Jeannie E. Roberts, who have served as editors on the fiction and poetry teams respectively, at a combined innings of 26 years between them, but are now moving on. We are so grateful for everything they have contributed to this zine, and wish them everything good for the future.
This also means the rest of the editorial team has been doing some thinking about the future, and how to make ourselves as resilient as possible. As a team of volunteers, we need our work to be sustainable, and with the growing volume of submissions over the years this has become more challenging. We have agreed some changes, most significantly:
We are moving back to a biannual publication model (rather than quarterly), and restructuring our submissions processes, so that we have more time for the editorial work and the publication process. This includes a slightly shorter window of six weeks to send us your submissions; and some tweaks to our guidelines and practices to allow us to be as efficient as possible.
Updated guidelines are available here.
We are reshuffling how our editorial teams function. We will now have individual editors responsible for all editorial decisions, with wider zine business managed separately. Specifically:
Phillip Watts Brown will be the lead poetry editor.
Carrie Bachler will be the lead fiction editor.
Ellen Herbert will be the lead nonfiction editor.
I (Alison Stedman) will focus on wider editorial roles, including publication.
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Thank you to all our readers and writers for supporting us over the last 21 years and 75 issues. We have loved reading your work and your reflections on this, and other, themes. While you may notice some changes in our normal rhythm, we hope these will enable us to streamline the work as much as possible and continue serving our community sustainably over the years to come. Please get in touch and let us know if you have any feedback on how it’s all going.
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Alison Stedman is an editor at Halfway Down the Stairs.
© Alison Stedman
Halfway Down the Stairs 