Welcome to Sextet Issue II: Traces. For our second issue, we are delighted to bring together works examining echoes, remnants, silhouettes, and shadows. Our seventeen writers forge a desire path through language, conjuring up shapes that hover in the corner of your eye, and honing in on overlooked fragments as vessels for potential.
Twists in perspective take us to the places traces linger. Mary Turkot sees the extraordinary in the everyday: lipstick marks on ceramic mugs becoming a glowing map of kinship. Ewen Glass searches for meaning in the entropic, in tracing shapes and breaking patterns. Zaman Hazir and Ben Macnair play with our expectations, examining what we take for granted, while Jeremiah Pitt interrogates the symbolic. Zackary Chong asks us to not just read, but cross-read, for technicolour traces of text that slot together across verses to reveal new meanings.
Traces of the body appear in a number of these contributed works, reaching out to touch the landscape. Celestine Stilwell and Eloise Schultz both evoke lingering sensation in their writing, as Stilwel’s disembodied sounds place ghosts into the fabric of a house, and Schultz reorders the known universe to the tune of a fiddle. Christie Williamson calls on the Shetland landscape in cascading paragraphs that wonder what is fleeting, and what remains. Lana Eileen and Bella Melardi’s contributions are both coated in a layer of snow so thick it becomes bodily, but while Eileen’s winter landscape is full of arms reaching out to form an embrace, Melardi’s looms over us, humming with dread.
Many of our writers look to those moments where life and death trace one another’s footsteps, forgetting who is following who. Greg Thorpe pulls from the past to stitch together moments of fear, mundanity, and joy into a snapshot of queer living during the AIDs crisis. Kate Horsley’s rainsoaked memories turn familiarity on its head, while Michael Toussaint sorts through ephemera and is called back to the past. Lisa Delan traces the outline of herself again and again as she looks back on her life so far, and prepares for the future. The ghost of Walt Whitman indiscriminately drops crumbs and snippets of wisdom from Alice Rowena Wilson’s bedpost, and Ananya Kharat makes a home with someone hovering between not-quite-gone and not-quite-here.
We are so grateful to our contributors for their openness and for their trust. We would also like to thank our returning readers, and welcome new friends; we hope the traces gathered here project you to unexpected scales and places, or otherwise lead you by the hand to familiarity and warmth.
–Owen