From the Editor…

The rise of Substack (self-publishing mainly without peer review and often angling for money) is the primary reason Socrates on the Beach exists today, but another is some personal disappointment with the mountain of political writing that has grown prevalent in so-called literary journals and Web sites of late—indeed, the framing of literature and other art “in the era of President So-and-So” has troubled me and others, hastening the evisceration of memory that is seemingly becoming more widespread. The tinfoil tiara of “relevance” glitters in a culture in which growing numbers of people are confounded by Henry James’s words: “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance…I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.” Socrates on the Beach is a modest project, prizing longer-format works, when many journals publish short pieces, no matter the infinity of space on the Internet.

The words of the writers gathered in the first issue have all spoken to something subconscious in me—in some cases for just the past year and in others, for many. I believe the key word uniting them all is defiance—a word carrying a wonderful “sense three” definition in Webster’s Third International: “a state of opposition: a willingness to fight: disposition to resist: contempt of opposition.” I don’t mean that the writers embody such a stance, but I do see their work, all seven pieces, joined in the act of putting together words to stand against (and maybe even baffle) the status quo. It seems natural to begin with Genese Grill’s essay “On the Way to the Fen, Ethical and Aesthetic Quandaries Arise,” since it has at its roots the concern about the growing attacks on art, that very force which helps us live life. The essay is a fierce defense of art and culture in our time of toxic and reductivist political and moral posturing. The other essay, Tomoé Hill’s “Mumurations,” is a searing memoir about upbringing and moral and personal clashes, with an assured literary backbone—she asks how one can truthfully write about one’s life and how one can make the version palatable so one can comfortably live with it.

Each of the five pieces of fiction calls to mind the truism that no one else except the author could have written it. In every instance, one comes upon works that are things in themselves, prose that carves a trace in time. In Jen Craig’s excerpt from her forthcoming novel, Wall, one must jump into the fast-moving current that is her voice, and glory in recursions and cadence, which yield a sweet treat for those who seek feeling instead of information. In Garielle Lutz’s two stories, the reader steps into an indelible baroque lexicon lit by the fluorescent lights of supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, and discount stores, as a rich dark humor is embossed upon everyday Americana. Similarly, Alexander Theroux’s “The Copernicus Affair” contains sentences that thunder like slabs of rock when they meet the reader’s brainpan, and features a protagonist who is not so smart enough that he can see beyond his obsessions. Finally, Joseph McElroy’s “The Stranger,” the opening of a novel-in-progress, concerns the distant world of Greece in the fifth century BC, and formulates the consciousnesses presented with a warp and weft rarely encountered in English-language literature.

I have left untouched certain spellings and patterns of punctuation from across the oceans.

Thank you for visiting. I hope you will enjoy these works.

Greg Gerke