Editor Letter, Calling All Humans
Double down on gritty hope. The orcas would want you to. Send us your best by March 1, 2026.
Dear Human,
As I write this, it’s indeed extremely difficult to feel hopeful about the world if the primary seat of our worldview is North America. As the paraphrase of Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks goes, the new world struggles to be born and in the interregnum monsters rise and battle for control. For power, which stems partly from our belief in their inevitability.
And yet. We enter winter, when snow blankets the world and we have to slow down and move forward carefully to avoid treacherous ice and winter chill that can easily freeze flesh dead, in spite of rage at injustice that may burn within us. We are witnesses to daily abductions and kidnappings of adults and children everywhere in the United States with their supposed “illegality” as the pretext. We see brutal murders of peaceful demonstrators in the street. We glimpse furtive, guilty door-to-door paramilitary raids and before a person can raise a whistle to their lips, a family member or neighbor is gone. “Disappeared.” Around us, the puppetmasters of business and the state seem to be more interested in sating their private appetites for power and cruelty.
Better writers than I have urged us to remember how hope is not a wispy fragile thing, but a cussed, possibly middle-aged and/or possibly too young to know better thing, tired but present, trickling blood and at the same time pressing on the moral injury to keep from bleeding out.
I’m reminded of Marge Piercy’s poem, “To be of use”:
The people I love the best/ jump into the work head first/ without dallying in the shallows/ and swim off with sure strokes/ almost out of sight.
People around the US and around the world are swarming the streets. Demanding an end to monsters. Starving fascism and sticking knives into its flank from all sides with boycotts, songs, mutual aid, airhorns blasting through the sleep of the wicked, community defense, quiet grocery deliveries, and calm walks to school when a parent simply can’t. People are rescinding belief in monstrous inevitability, replacing belief so it lives in the conviction that together we can make the better world we need.
As writers, we may wonder how we may be of use.
At Dear Human, we believe more than ever that we who envision a better future must grow our numbers, expand our visions of what can and must be done, and enlist the passions of our sister and brother dreamers to build that future we need and our descendants deserve.
As writers and creators, we can smash the seeming “inevitability” of monsters winning. We steer belief to new places.
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
– Ursula K LeGuin
We make the world we know, and can dream of. Stories are bricks in the war of worlding, acts of creation are “sure strokes” that climb us through what feels like strong tides of oppression and burst us through to something better: to be the people we love best, jumping into the work head first.
Send us your stories of where we can and must go next. Do it by March 1, 2026.