5.1 Change: What is Normal. What is Not.–Call for Contributions

Change CHānj/noun

1. the act or instance of making or becoming different.

Climate and extreme weather. Sea levels. Melting polar ice caps. Disappearing species and jungles and islands. The planet is changing at an accelerating pace. And those changes are driving a divisiveness of social convention unlike we have seen in the United States and around the world. We are in a period of great change across the globe affecting economies and social order.  Widening income inequality. Brexit. The wild stock market.  Gender relations.  Race and culture. Standards of truth and behavior. It’s been one year since the first Women’s March protesting this not-normal presidency, although it feels unnaturally longer.  Each day, people check social media to see if the next change will be the worse than the last. Change is natural and inevitable. But there has been a paradigm shift in this 242-year-old democracy. The past year, it seems like there is an alarm bell going off somewhere to which we should be paying attention.

But people are educating themselves about issues, creating grassroots movements of resistance, and being aware about environmental policies because we recognize that we have to stand up so that we have a future.

For this issue, we seek poetry, stories, and essays that recognize and respond to how change–personal, societal, environmental, global—is affecting our perceptions and worldview. We seek writing that starts the conversation about this new world order as we are coming to know it.