EDITOR’S NOTE

Experience tells us it’s probably not going to work out. Yet every time we open a new submission, we bring fresh hope to the page along with some measure of hesitation. Every one of us who read “Six Months”—beginning with our fiction editor and a couple of crackerjack interns—found our way past that hesitation after the first few lines, and by the end we were in knots. Luther’s visa was just about to expire and his two worlds were on the verge of a collision that would ruin them both. Here was a story we were all excited to publish in NER. But did we trust ourselves; had we really just struck unsolicited-submission gold? Who was this writer? Was this dialect accurate, or even authentic? In the end, none of that even mattered, because by the time we finished reading we were entirely convinced by the story itself. It was as if we’d just spent time in Luther Archibald Junior’s presence as he told us about his harrowing misadventures in New York. We believed him, and we believed in this writer.

As it happens, Celeste Mohammed, who was born and raised in Trinidad, had to overcome some internalized censorship of her own to get this voice onto the page, and we think she succeeded beautifully.

It also seems worth noting that we accepted this story—a highly empathic story about “illegals”—on inauguration day in 2017.

Carolyn Kuebler, editor

New England Review