It’s spring as I write this from my desk in London. I’m watching the occasional airplane fly by as I contemplate my own impending travel in the coming weeks because of the vagaries and injustices that are borders. It’s strange; the sky used to be more crowded with them. I have lived as an itinerant for the last half-decade, traveling alternately in the footsteps of restless dissatisfaction and urgent curiosity. I find I’m always seeking. Much like in my reading and writing life.
I’ve found in the past few years that there are two main ways to travel. Either you have the means to travel self-sufficiently, with suitcases full of all that you need and the financial means to board in a discrete hotel room, with privacy and a small patch of sovereignty and the ability to keep yourself distant if you so desire. Or, you come with less. You rely on those who greet you when you arrive, who make room for you in their homes, in their communal spaces; you trust that they will share what you could not carry and in return, you give of yourself—your time, your stories, your labor, your care.
Eventually, you leave again—but one of these modes of travel leaves an indelible mark long after you’ve gone.
Perhaps there was something in the water as all of these stories came out, or maybe it was sheer coincidence—but allow me to draw these connections, even if they exist only in my own head. Maybe that’s the truth of the correlation, anyway—I picked them because something in me is obsessed with the idea of movement, especially now that it has been restricted and loaded with danger and consequences in a way that casual travel wasn’t before. But we are barreling through another year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and travel—the notion of it, the idea of free movement, the sharp, frightening and glorious idea of how close we all truly are to each other—it’s been forever changed. And I think that most of the stories I’ve chosen for this anthology reflect this in some way or another, for all that they deal with speculative worlds.
More than a few aptly speculate on the distances that separate us as global catastrophe changes the very landscapes we traverse, like Waverly SM’s flooded England in “The Last Good Time to Be Alive,” where everyone outside of central London risks starvation as their homes are swallowed up, calling to mind the way the global north will weather climate change. Another is Brenden Williams-Childs “The Wedding after the Bomb,” where our narrator hikes through the burnout zone of a nuclear bomb, all to attend the wedding of two people they’re not sure are still alive.
In fact, there’s a line in Childs’ story that echoes a theme of travel that I love: “You won’t be the same person you were when you went into [the woods]. This is true about everywhere you go.” You may leave a mark on a place, but it will always leave its mark on you, whether you realize it or not—but it will change you the most if you’re open to the transformation. It is a story many queer people know well, as we go on long journeys to transform ourselves and be perceived truly. Many of the stories in this anthology show this transformation literally, including Charlie Jane Anderson’s “If You Take My Meaning,” where revolutionaries journey into the depths of a mountain to become hybrid beings that just might save humanity, and “Rat and Finch Are Friends,” where two boys who can turn into animals find themselves crossing a chasm that is wider than them realize, and with painful consequences. And there is Anya Johanna DeNiro’s “A Voyage to Queensthroat,” where, through pilgrimage and devotion, a child can become the woman she was meant to be.
For others, travel is about seeking answers, seeking comfort, seeking truth or love—seeking the self. And these also are journeys queer people often take out of necessity, and they are worth taking even if, on the outside, you remain exactly as you are, because on the inside the trials and discoveries have made you into something stronger, sturdier, maybe even whole. A few stories in this vein include “Salt and Iron” by Gem Isherwood, where a woman cursed with iron fists and a blind woman fight in their own ways against a world that would have them kneel to others and “To Balance the Weight of Khalem,” which...well, it truly defies description, but you will follow a scholar on their own journey through space and memory as delicate as the crinkled husk of an onion.
There are stories of escape. The flight of the refugee, the persecuted. Stories of entrapment, so that the only journeys you can take are in your imagination. Those, too, are stories that queer people know too well. There are even stories in the form of that oh-so-familiar quest, video games and super heroes, all queered.
In all of these journeys, it is love that carries the characters from one point of the journey to the end (do these journeys ever truly end?): love for their partners, love for their community, their family, even love for themselves, which is often the hardest love to give. It’s the glue that will hold us together.
It would be easy in a time like this—in fact, it has been recommended—to close down, stay put, and seal ourselves off from others. It’s safest. It protects us. But it will also damn us, if we are too locked within our strongholds to reach out to one another. And there are ways, healthy, safe ways, to keep ourselves open and available to make gifts out of each others’ presences and resources, digital or otherwise.
As a people, humanity has a great capacity for generosity, a tensile strength that can hold together under the strongest beatings; marginalized people in particular know this well. More often than not, we have been all that we had, and so we cling to that.
But that generosity doesn’t have to stay within the margins.
Reach out. Come with me.
The only way we’ll get where we’re going is together.
C.L. Clark
May 2021
London, England