Welcome to Sextet Issue I: Future/Past. Here we have gathered twenty-one authors whose expansive, interdisciplinary practices reach far beyond this issue. Working across diverse geographies, disciplines, and traditions, these writers inhabit places from Glasgow to Oklahoma, from Orkney to Kerala, and beyond. Their contributions explore memory, place, and tradition, drawing on folklore, mythology, and the rituals of everyday life. Drawn together in this issue, they each consider what it means to re-encounter our pasts and to imagine our futures. They look to the land, to myth, and to the stories we tell about ourselves and the world we move through.

These works explore the potential for language to hold both the inherited and the anticipated at once. Acts of remembering, storytelling, and language emerge as sacred gestures, with writing as the ritual through which we imagine and reimagine. Here, time pauses and expands, transforming both the past and future. Boundaries between memory, body, and environment blur and become sites of excavation and possibility. They consider the fragments, the silences, and the stories passed down through generations, held within our bodies and landscapes as living archives that continually transform and return to us.

The topography of these works, from island peat bogs and Icelandic shores to Glasgow Green and the digital sphere, are not static backdrops but living grounds of remembrance and transformation. Benjamin Blyth explores the liminality of memory and belonging, and how they are rooted in the land. He uncovers traces of the past, treating memory as something that shifts and resurfaces through time. In Christie Williamson’s Shetlandic verse, language itself becomes a token of remembering and reckoning, its cadence ushering the past into the future.

Across many of these contributions, voices turn to folklore and myth to imagine what might come after forgetting. For some, looking to the past offers the potential for renewal, and for others, meaning emerges in the everyday rituals that resist disillusionment. Emilia Juliette looks to Icelandic folklore to consider the self as reshaped by the past, and Hannah Floyd subverts myths of creation to find the sacred within modernity. In Clare O’Brien’s work, hallowed moments transform into pixels that dissolve, flicker, and fade into digital memory. Through these snapshots, the everyday becomes a site where mythology and the sacred exist alongside the pervasive anxiety of the present.

Reimagined futures are offered by some as acts of care and resistance. Mayah Monet Lovell’s work reclaims the Black queer body as a site of ritual and embodied epistemology, where knowledge lives through desire and connection. Emily Christie writes through a feminist lens of remembering and survival. Language, place, and body hold both the weight of the past and the potential to reimagine what we inherit.

We are deeply grateful to our contributors for the generosity of their offerings and for trusting us with their work. We thank them for helping us shape Sextet’s beginnings. We hope readers take time here and find resonance and return.

–Catriona