When I was selecting the material for this issue, I noticed a trend of stories and poems that had to do with questions of the divine, questions about what awaits us in the afterlife. Living as we do, on Earth, we can never really know these things. The afterlife exists in our imaginations, in our hopes and in our fears. Many of the contributors to this issue explore those possibilities.

So I began to refer to this issue as the "Heaven & Hell" issue, and when it came time to name it, I could think of nothing that encapsulated it quite so well.

The terms heaven and hell have come to symbolize much more than our conception of the afterlife. They have come to represent the two extremes of human existence: the heaven of hopes and love and pleasure, the hell of fear and pain and misery. And sometimes they can be the flip side of the same thing, for example, being in love. Or sometimes, when you discover that what you thought was good for you was really the worst possible thing.

There are, of course, the gray areas, which might considered akin to purgatory. But "Heaven & Hell & Purgatory" didn't have the same ring.

I invite you to explore the various meanings of heaven and hell, and perhaps to bring back some useful insights from your pilgrimage.

 

Alyce Wilson, Wild Violet editor