EDITOR’S LETTER

51 PARENTHETICAL Charlie Kite

Rae Diamond

54 POETRY TRYPTIC Urayoán Noel

Cathy Linh Che

Jeremy Caniglia is an American figurative painter and illustrator, primarily in fantasy and horror genres. His work is in several important public collections including the Joslyn Art Museum and Iowa State University.

Editor-in-Chief & Art Director Eric Akoto QR Code Generator - New Manageeric.akoto@litrousa.com Managing Editor Annikka Olsen annikka.olsen@litrousa.com Assistant Editor Drew Pisarra drew.pisarra@litrousa.com Online Editor online@litrousa.com Advertising sales@litrousa.com Cover Image Jeremy Caniglia General Inquiries info@litrousa.com

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Iwas 14 when I first laid my hands on a chemistry set. It wasn’t mine entirely, mind you. I shared the kit with my lab partner, a London transplant recently from India with whom I’d been paired, simply because my last name began with “A” and his with “B.” Instant mates thanks to the alphabet, we bonded in our compulsory science class via experiments inspired by this newfound kit. The chemistry set, a smart-looking wooden box, came with a test tube rack and niches to store vials of powerful powders as well as a little packet of litmus paper, a knobbed glass rod, and a thick textbook intended to serve as our manual and guide. I don’t recall that book’s title or whether I ever cracked open its spine, frankly. What I do remember are a metal looped device for suspending the test tube over an open flame, a conversion table (translating ounces into spoons) and my favorite component: the poison labels. We were living life on the edge!

Kid “B” was studious, attentive at lectures, and measured ingredients exactingly while Kid “A” dreamt about the potential outcomes of that Pandora’s box of stink bombs, toxins, and disappearing inks. For the next four years, each class was a true “experiment” for the two of us. For while I slopped about, blending sundry tinctures, grounding up crystals, and concocting smells that distressed most of our class, he never undermined the fun even as he ensured we met the demands of that week’s lesson. To me, that’s always been what experimentation should be about: a rebellious mix of pleasure and persnicketiness in search of something new, unexpected, unknown.

Which isn’t to say that experimentation doesn’t have a serious side to it, too: An article published at the

beginning of 2022 in the New York Times cites the remarkably roundabout discovery of one mRNA vaccine. That all-too-true tale was set in a lab in Bethesda, Md., where scientists were combatting a deadly coronavirus which “had jumped from camels to humans in the Middle East – killing 1 out of every 3 people infected.” World-renowned virologist Dr. Barney Graham’s quest for a vaccine had proven largely unsuccessful, when suddenly, the stakes went up dramatically as one of his cohorts appeared to have come down with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome under study. An initial nose swab’s tentative verification was followed by a second test that revealed Graham’s ailing colleague was suffering, not from MERS, but from a related yet milder if still serious variation more akin to a flu bug on steroids. For reasons not so easily classified (gut instinct? a feeling? intuition?), Graham chose to focus on this other virus. And that decision unexpectedly resulted in an mRNA vaccine that’s saved countless lives from being Covid-19 fatalities worldwide.

It’s a strange reminder how default hierarchies often limit the potential of any given piece of work… be it in the arts or in the sciences. Stepping outside what’s expected is exactly what leads us to unexpected rewards. Not to sound grand, but that’s exactly what we’ve aimed to do in the current issue. Herein you’ll find example after example of writers, artists, essayists who have disregarded standardized marching orders in search of a truth outside the boundary of convention. And they’ve done so without ever feeling academic.

How many times have you read that pop culture is making us dumber, crasser, more immature. At Slate, Ruth Graham skewered YA fiction as “escapism, instant gratification and nostalgia,” while scolding the non-children who read it: “Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this.” New York Times critic A.O. Scott, for his part, proclaimed the rise of YA lit was symptomatic of the impending “death of adulthood.” Meanwhile, over at the New Republic, William Giraldi declared the very adult 50 Shades of Grey as a sign that “We’re an infirm, ineffectual tribe still stuck in some sort of larval stage.” Sounds a bit like a tantrum to us. Because what if that sense of play – so organic to childhood and youth and sex – is exactly what’s needed for us to evolve? What if that spirit of irreverence for “grown-up” things isn’t a shortcoming but an advantage? What if the rule-breaking associated with adolescence is something worth a revisit post haste? And so…

We’re opening the pages of our experimental issue with a cartoony battle between Highbrow and Lowbrow as depicted in the delightful graphic novelette The Book Fight which presents an imaginary literary battle between genres – a tongue in cheek take on the history of the avant garde lit if there ever were one. As to the form’s future, Alison Norrington looks at cross-platform explorations in her essay “Storytelling: The Global Rabbithole” while Ars Poetica founder LA Marks reimagines versifying as a lucrative business in “The Unexpected Pay off of Poetry.” A discussion between Chavisa Woods, Executive Director of A Gathering of the Tribes, and spoken word legend Regie Cabico, adds a very of-the-moment perspective from two authors whose commitment to “what’s next” has found them both participating in this year’s Whitney Biennial. Other storytellers in the issue are pulling out their own literary chemistry kits via mind-bending pieces that employ everything from adventurous punctuation to interwoven languages to scriptwriting as a newly imagined form of fiction. We also have the distinct privilege of reprinting an experimental piece from renowned, award-winning playwright Adrienne Kennedy.

Furthermore, this issue presents Litro’s inaugural visual art section. We see that as our own way of trying something new! Here, visual artists – from diverse backgrounds and working in a multitude of mediums – grapple with what it means to push the envelope through their choice of media and/or imagery as they explore content directly engaging with the social/cultural issues of our day.

It is our modest hope that these experiments, be they literary or visual, will offer our readers, old and new, the opportunity to reevaluate and question what is possible. What is showcased here in Litro’s Experimental Issue is a starting point, a call to action to think and to create beyond tradition and the status quo—within the scope of the arts yes, but dare we add, well beyond that, too.