EDITORIAL
Longing Beyond the Surface

Michael A. King

Full disclosure: not by design (at least conscious) but by coincidence, this issue of DreamSeeker Magazine ended up being a family project. Except for Marshall King, who has no direct family connections, every other writer whose name includes King is related.

Now I do not as editor intend to be an easy touch for family members. After seeing her work, I told one daughter, “Don’t let anyone else have it. I want to publish it.” But as she later reported, “I couldn’t believe it! I’ve never been able to get Dad to publish anything of mine because he always says, ‘Since you’re my daughter, I’m not comfortable publishing that.’” And another daughter could confirm that, perhaps partly because she is my daughter, she had to do multiple rewrites.

Of course I’m flesh and blood. How can I ever be be sure I would have published these King authors if I didn’t so well know and love them apart from their writing? So let me just wade in and say who is who: Nöel is my sister. How this affects my reaction to her writing I have no idea; I just know every time I read one of her “Turqoise Pen” columns I’m tickled and can’t help but hope others will share in the joy. Kristy and Rachael are my daughters and Evelyn my aunt.

All one way or another wormed their way into my cold editor’s heart maybe partly through first gaining access to my warm human heart as their brother, father, or nephew—but also, I hope, because each has something important to say.

Though I worked with each on separate tracks and only realized at the end what had happened, something special, I think, is revealed about life’s stages by the fact that Evelyn at age 83 reports from the edge of death itself; Kristy ponders from the edge of adulthood at age 21 what a different culture can teach; and Rachael reveals the treasure a teenager can find when she looks in the right place. Meanwhile Nöel and I are in the generational middle, as from her earlier midlife and my later one we laugh or rage.

It turned out to be a good time for family members to be represented, given that regular columnists Valerie Weaver-Zercher and Dave Greiser were so busy they had to take a break this time around.

If King writers contribute to a theme that seems loosely to link these writings—which is along the lines of longing beyond the surface of what is—they are joined by many other gifted writers. The poets speak from or evoke such longing as they address lighthouse keeping, the vision in the mirror, dinnertime, seeing the angels. The writers on anger wonder when we must move beyond it and when anger provides the energy that helps us to see what is not but needs to be. Christian Early helps us wonder what would be the point of thinking if we never thought beyond our starting point. And in looking at war, present and past, Weaver and Hertzler are longing for the peace beyond it. Let it be so.
—Michael A. King