Freedom: Voices at the Edge Notes from the Creative Literary Arts Editor

Freedom is in the voice. The right to name one’s own experiences.

Freedom is inside the individual’s conscience.

Freedom lies in the true self, in the right to be real.

Freedom is the capacity to begin anew.

What does freedom feel like? What does the absence of freedom feel like if freedom is taken away? I sent out this call a few months ago, and a flood of creative writing arrived, in short order, from no less than five continents. The pieces that follow explore freedom as interpreted by their writers: as political, emotional, creative experiences, from the streets of New York, to the hillsides of California, to many places between these coasts. From Europe, Africa, Australia, South America, and Asia. Each contributor writes about their own experience of freedom.

In the United States, we are living through politically unstable times, as long-held rights once taken for granted are threatened, and our fragile freedoms are under assault. Elsewhere, the dangers are immediate and, sometimes, even writing a single sentence on the topic of freedom can endanger or cost a life.

In this section of Creative Literary Arts, a relational psychoanalyst in Iran describes an experience of brutal tyranny and the terror of curling up in his apartment while rounds of gunfire fill the streets of Tehran, while thousands of protestors are annihilated amid the violent suppression. His piece stands out with its immediacy, its urgency.

Many of the poems and short stories are written with visionary radiance, and express emotional freedom through an unapologetically creative

voice. Other pieces explore the intimate relationship between patient and therapist. A poet from Scotland writes of the enchantment and unabandoned innocence of childhood. Another poet recalls her Polish grandfather explaining