Editor’s Foreword “I’m open to the fates. It’s myself and the four winds,” says Mr. Kelliher, the bartender in Kevin Barry’s “Breakfast Wine,” from this year’s Two Thirds North. And here we are in Stockholm, the four winds bearing to us voices of poets and story writers, translators and comic artists from China, Ireland, Lithuania, Australia, Hong Kong, Rwanda, the UK, the US, New Zealand, and Sweden. Many of these writers, like our editorial staff, have been open to the fates, led or forced across borders to places not of their origin. And this quality gives to Two Thirds North the transnational tone we seek to receive, like a delicate radio signal, and then broadcast to the world. Yet notions of place and time often bring to the writer a sense of displacement and lostness in time. A number of this year’s submissions have been ruthlessly gathered under the thematic rubrics of Out of Place, and Out of Time. The first segment, Out of place may suggest anything from a longing for an abandoned country, to the disjointedness of a family torn by an ethnic civil war, or simply the pleasure of being in one place instead of another. Out of time brings us closer to the final moments of a person’s life, to the multiple layers of time that remain in a place violently covered by new cultures, or a post-modern compressions of all cultural times in one, or just the desire to escape from the idling of time in a waiting room. This year we have introduced poetry translations and have submissions from China and Sweden. Translation is at the heart of writing, the translating of feelings and ideas to words.
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