AL&C Editors' Note:

This Is Not a Time To Be Without Wishes:
Writers and Artists Invent Another World

A Special feature of
American Letters & Commentary
Issue 16

Ernst Bloch wrote, "This is not a time to be without wishes," and we agree. So we asked writers and artists to "Create a future. Write a world. Wish for something. Invent a terrain Visit a planet. Explode a myth." We asked for worlds and they arrived: faxed galaxies, planets in Fed Ex packets.

The strategies for creating these worlds are as various as the results. The writers and artists in this issue sit in God's seat, quarrel with our request, circle around quotations from other writers like fickle moons, photograph people holding signs with their hopes written on them, overlay and rearrange texts of creation and invention, and dive into the etymology of words to find the worlds behind them.

As the spirits tell the heroine of Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth century novel, The Blazing World,

"... every human Creature can create an Immaterial World fully inhabited by immaterial Creatures, and populous of immaterial subjects, such as we are, and all this within the compass of the head or scull; nay not onely so, but he may create a World of what fashion and Government he will, and give the Creatures thereof such motions, figures, forms, colours, perceptions, &c as he thinks best; nay he may make a World full of Veins, Muscles, and Nerves, and all these to move by one jolt or stroke; also he may alter that world as often as he pleases, or change it from a natural world, to an artificial; he may make a world of Ideas, a world of Atomes, a world of Lights, or whatsoever his fancy leads him to."

We hope the following pieces will inspire you to invent your own.

                                                         — Matthea Harvey

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