Who are we? We’re some of the volunteer readers at Overland – you might recognise our names from the editorial pages of the journal. Ordinarily, we have the pleasure of reading a selection of the works submitted to the journal each month before they move onto Claire’s desk for further consideration. We read and carefully consider each piece, but don’t make the final choice of what’s published, and we don’t ordinarily interact with the authors.

How do you theme a fiction special that was created and pulled together in the depths of a global pandemic and severe lockdown? You don’t. You find a collection of talented writers and let them do what they do best. Thanks to the support of a Creative Victoria grant, this fiction special features a very talented selection of writers whose stories offer us a brief reprieve from the world we’ve all inhabited this year.

It feels like a decade has passed since we moved to Melbourne to take up work in the unceded lands of the Kulin nations. In our first days here, we attended several sessions of the Activism @ the Margins Conference, held in RMIT’s Capitol Theatre. It was perhaps the most diverse and interdisciplinary conference we’ve attended in our careers, with dozens of presentations challenging already contested boundaries of critical and creative performance.

The Ngaga-dji Report,  titled with the Woiwurung word ‘Ngaga-dji’, meaning ‘hear me/hear us’, was released by the Koorie Youth Council in August 2018. It offers sustained insights into the challenges faced by young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who come into contact with the criminal justice system in Victoria. These insights, drawn from children’s perspectives, are crucial for researchers, advocates, policymakers and practitioners from across a range of institutions to consider when working with young people.

In the first half of 2020, Overland received a small grant to help the magazine provide writing and publishing opportunities during the pandemic lockdown, part of a broader scheme by Creative Victoria to save the arts sector when so many jobs and gigs completely disappeared for so many artists. ‘Poetry in Lockdown’ is one outcome of this—

Health, wellness, well-being, words which resonate with the most basic social questions of how we are toward one another. This year our answers have been drastically rearranged – we care for one another with distance, and forego almost all the habits of flourishing or eudaimonia. Not that it’s ever been simple: our essayists for Overland 239 approach these problems from a wide variety of intersecting experiences and disciplines.

Resistance is the tenor of reality, and action in it is compromised, bloody-handed, in the world and of it. In some senses it can seem that an ever-larger stake of leftist discourse is consumed by a miserabilist scramble for seniority on a narrowing mesa of unhistorical piety. In the crisis of social, ethical, and ecological collapse that greets us daily, clean hands look more than ever like magical thinking.

There are many things that come to mind when I sit down to write about these stories. The first is how great they are: that much is clear. But hovering over that is the cloud of everything that’s happened since submissions for this edition closed.

Last night I attended a talk by former editor Jeff Sparrow, about his new book on fascism and the Christchurch massacre. ‘What can we do about the intense alienation and isolation that many people seem to feel today?’ someone in the audience asked.

Since learning that we are to lose $80,000 a year in funding from 2021, we’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on contemporary literary culture and its public perception. To put this figure in perspective, $80,000 is about three editions of the print magazine each year or three roles at the magazine (we only have four positions, or the equivalent of 2.2 full-time staff).

When conceiving of this issue, I found myself wanting to bite back at critics of futurism. Those who call it sentimental, puerile, unrealistic. A fairy tale. Wish fulfilment. Such an anti-utopian mindset is what, I would argue, inspired Jonathan Franzen to write in The New Yorker recently that we may as well accept defeat against the climate emergency. I see this anti-utopianism everywhere. In fact, I see it in myself.

It has been a privilege to edit a magazine that emerged from different left traditions and continues to find new ways to foster radical spaces and thought. For me, it has always been the making of the magazines that I loved (18 print editions since 2015, and countless online editions and pieces) and the ephemerality of each edition, a collaboration shaped by all the ideas and forces around it.

We think of sex as primordial and innate, but it is both the target of market strategies and highly mediated. The inventions of virtual reality, sexbots and RealDolls have broad implications. Dick pics, sexting, Tinder and Grindr have revolutionised the hook-up and, by extension, our sexual moralities.

We need new voices and unconventional narratives to guard against rigidity. Plots that are distinct and lucid and sometimes boiling hot.

As I write this, we are still in mourning from a right-wing terror attack on Christchurch that took many lives, and damaged us all. Two weeks ago today, the true and brutal nature of fascism yet again showed its hideous visage.