In defense of being beside the point –   when budgets enter freefall and dollars are short, creative people working in the arts are often pressed to give utilitarian expression to what we do. We produce neither bricks, nor mortar, nor physical sustenance of any kind.  True, at least words leave no physical trace beyond the flashing of synaptic nerves — the work of words vanishes in the blink of the cursor on the screen. What we do produce settles only on the garbage heap of time, like so many useless plastic toys, but without all the toxic runoff.

If demographers predict correctly, verbal artists of today will have fewer and fewer readers in the days to come. Not only will human population begin to shrink from 2050 onwards, but the number of people who read for pleasure is shrinking dramatically with each half generation.  (America’s National Endowment for the Arts reckons that the number of young people reading any literature at all has dropped 20% over the last 15 years alone.)

Given all this, why write? Chinua Achebe once said, “language rescues us from bestiality.” To express this  another way, language is “mythodical.” It systematically awakens our imaginative faculties and our capacity for empathy at the same time. Can we ever have enough?

The selections in this third issue of Beside the Point mythodically open landscapes for us. Some of these landscapes are ugly, all too familiar and violent; others writers here create for us the lost landscapes of childhood, or the subtle landscapes of overlooked sensory experience, like scent.    As Kade Krokosinski writes in her poem about hitchhiking, at times “there is only room to look out the window.”

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