Substrate

Speaking to another respectable flesh and blood person forces you to think more clearly.

I'll go over all the layers that I've been able to debug in myself. …I think that perfectionism is mostly a thin veil hiding a multitude of insecurities, fears, and logical fallacies. And it’s something we need to face.

For these patients, the therapeutic womb and its perpetual present can be a blessed gift, an investment that makes extension into the future possible again... a bit later. But most of us are not so tightly past-bound. Instead, our past tethers us with loose reins, or we hold the past lightly in one hand as we reach towards the future with the other. Future-oriented clients may not be best-served by even friendly and warm invitations to wallow in the present.

ISSUE SIX features fiction by Christopher Higgs, Jennifer Kronovet, Kyle Minor, Mark Jude Poirier, and Maura Stanton; creative nonfiction by Priscilla Becker, Jehanne Dubrow, and Emily O’Neill; film writing by J.M. Tyree; poetry by Diannely Antigua, Sandra Beasley, Molly Bendall, Jericho Brown, Heat

healing doesn’t happen in a linear manner, but in an ever-outward spiral; you will find yourself in the same place, but in a slightly different one, again and again