A Note from the Creative Literary Editor

Presence and Absence. Connection and separation. What are the ways we hold on to another even when that person is not physically present? Exploring these questions is part of what happens in therapy. It also happens in writing. Stories carry both memory and longing and offer moments so vivid that both writer and reader become immersed in their sensual vitality. In memory, no one is ever absent; rather, persons we've lost continue to inhabit an emotional inner landscape, infused with the treasure of what they mean to us.

In this issue we take up loss in its universality. In our new section Private Lives, (page 99) Clemens Loew writes about loss in his personal essay “The Apron.” In this section, loss is uniquely expressed by three different writers. Judith Lit, the author of the short story “Absence,” is an American documentary filmmaker who lives in France five months of the year. In this piece, she speaks of her connection with a neighbor, an elderly farmer who lived a life very different from her own. Despite their lack of similarities, a bond grew between them in surprising ways; a relationship took root in their mutual love of the land and nature. How do we hold on to someone long after they are gone? The author discovers that her connection to the earth is so primal that she is irrevocably linked to her now-absent friend.

The poem, “In My Rocking Chair,” also evokes themes of absence. How can a person who is absent still strongly affect one's experience, and in this way continue to be very present? The other poem, “Jail Dance,” brings us to a place of absence, even in the physical presence of the other.

Presence is a quality of being. We may recognize it in great works of music and art, in moments of oneness with nature, in the moving novel, story, poem—and sometimes even in our better analytic hours. Yet, absence and presence will always remain in dialectic tension because they each contain the essence of the other.