When I began The History of Arcadia visionary fiction series with a children’s book from another world, footnoted by its physicists, I wrote about a world formed by a fairy tale, by someone remembering who they really were. And in that book, and the succeeding ones (YA novel, literary novel, science fiction novel), there was a constant theme of resistance. Resistance of the smaller, more humane Arcadia to Megalopolis, the huge technology and power loving mega-land that threatened to engulf it.
As I wrote those books, Arcadia became more and more worn down by the fight. It even started to lean toward Megalopolis. It was failing in its mission, which was to extend what it really means to be human out into the part of the world that moved further away from true humanity all the time.
When I got to the fifth book, which I’m still in the process of writing, Arcadia is fighting itself, not just Megalopolis. And while all this fighting is going on, the world is destroyed.
So I thought to myself, why is that? And then I realized. Arcadia has shrunk itself smaller and smaller in trying to resist a larger foe. It has begun to lose hope. To disbelieve in its own agency. To be a victim, fruitlessly confronting a far more powerful foe.
It was starting to give up.
There was only one way forward. To persist in a world view, to embody it, to enlarge it to include everything, stubbornly, that is the best about humankind.
Kindness. Family, no matter how defined. Mutual aid. Community. Love of Nature. Acceptance of Death.
To enlarge itself, stubbornly. To keep going. To not look around at a mirage of supposedly greater power and despair. To believe in its mission. To keep creating and generating joy.
So this is what I’m hoping for all of us in the EAP community. An enlargement of your creative life. A growing stronger as a force of love and the desire to help those weaker than oneself. A love of nature as we are a part of nature, pushing us to new ways to integrate ourselves rather than define ourselves as separate from it.
To never forget that we are human.
You see how EAP contributors wrestle with that temptation to forget, which is a temptation to forget that we die, to blame our suffering because of that on someone else. To face the complexity of it, rather than simplify the puzzle as just someone else’s fault, and if that someone was gone, how lovely everything would be. Have a look at Ellen Morris Prewitt’s The Blank Spot in Our Brains. Think about why, as Zhinia Noorian and Brian Griffith write, there are Forgotten Female Scholars of Medieval Islam. Why, as David D. Horowitz says, there is delight in thinking “You Always Remembered My Name!” And why the least might be first, as the poet knows. John Grey’s Dead Moose on the Road.
Welcome to 2025. And to active persistence, replacing reactive resistance.
More than ever, I appreciate our EAP community. I do hope we all know what we’re doing here.
Here’s my wish for you and for myself: May 2025 bring you joy—and may you bring joy to 2025.
(Welcome to newcomers, the poet Caitlin O’Halloran whose piece Forgetting is in this issue. Galen Pickett, whose piece goes up next issue is a physicist. We love it when scientists join us, especially when they transmute their work into fairy tales. Because where did science spring from, if not from myths and legends? And where will it find new inspiration, except in new stories?)