It’s Reading Weather

Where I live, in the Wissahickon Creek Watershed, it’s full-on autumn. By the time this letter reaches you, the brilliantly colored red and yellow leaves that are falling now at even the slightest breeze will be a brown carpet of leaf litter, providing insulation and nourishment to the forest floor, not to mention cover for animals who will be hunkering down for even colder weather soon. I’ve swapped the short-sleeve shirts that were in my closet with the flannels that were in storage, and a chunky second-hand wool cardigan with well-worn leather buttons is what I find myself reaching for in the cool mornings to keep me warm while the coffee brews.

This is reading weather. Welcome to November, where it is our custom to treat readers to an expanded book review section, and where, for the sixth year now, our editors have curated a collection of fiction by Friends. Fittingly for this season of harvest, it’s a bumper crop.

Where will you start? Perhaps with some flash fiction like George Lukalo’s near-death “Journey of Grace” or Eric Sableman’s dreamlike “The Line of Walkers,” each vivid and memorable in ways that belie their brevity. Then on to “Barn Cat” by Vicki Winslow, which for me resonates with Brad Sheeks’s review of Love in a Different Way: A Journey Through Dementia found in this issue’s Books section. As Winslow’s character Frances would put it, “Show me a coincidence; I’ll show you God directing my attention.”

Glenn Morison’s “Quitting and Starting” inhabits a Quaker meeting riven by speculation, shock, and shame, as the reader wrestles, like its characters, with questions many of us face in our real lives. What goes said, and what goes unsaid? Can we ever truly know what goes on behind our neighbors’ closed doors? Even in his absence, the central figure dominates the community he had to leave behind.

In “Encounter with Razor Wire,” Margaret Crompton dramatizes the quintessentially Quaker work of prison visitation, moving between spaces of freedom and unfreedom, humanizing both those who are caught up in the criminal-judicial machinery and those whose care surrounds them.

Beck Daniel Wren, recently featured by Roxane Gay in her “Emerging Writer Series,” brings us “Starlings,” which to me evokes Robert Heinlein, Franz Kafka, and John Steinbeck, and in which we see society’s xenophobia refracted and glistening, like light scattered by the wings of the titular birds. 

There’s no wrong way to work your way through a bounty like this. I hope you enjoy these stories, and I hope you’ll pass this issue along to a friend.