Recently, I’ve found myself thinking about the song “Five Years,” which opens David Bowie’s 1972 album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It’s a great song, one of my favorite in Bowie’s oeuvre, not least for its slow ebb and flow, building stanza by stanza from the steady drum shuffle of the intro, through the soaring strings and vocal lines that mark the final, repeating refrain before, in the end, returning to the solitary beat with which it began.
“We’ve got five years,” Bowie sings, “stuck on my eyes. / Five years, what a surprise.” For me, however, the most resonant lyric appears at the end of the fourth verse, when the singer admits: “I never thought I’d need so many people.”
After five years of editing Air/Light, I understand just what he means.
In that spirit, welcome to issue twelve of Air/Light, which (among other things) commemorates the fifth anniversary of our first. To have reached such a milestone feels like an accomplishment worth noting, especially in a world where the most encompassing truth about literary journals may be the speed with which they disappear. We’ve been fortunate—I’ll be the first to acknowledge that. We’re part of a supportive community, which has allowed us, in turn, to develop or broaden our own community: a collective of writers and artists working, not least of all, to challenge themselves. In the editor’s note to our debut issue, I suggested that “we like literature that takes the gloves off. We like literature that means what it says. And we like literature that plays a little fast and loose with expectations, with tradition and with hierarchy, that blurs the boundaries not only between genres but also between forms.” Looking back across what we have published, as well as forward to the future, I want to say that this is what we have done, and will continue to do.
At the same time, making a magazine is a learning experience. It is—it must be—a collaborative exercise. Collaborative between the journal and its readers, certainly. But also collaborative within the journal itself. It has been my privilege over these five years to have worked with a variety of gifted editors, all of them artists in their own right. It has been my process to collaborate with them, as they collaborate with one another, in making Air/Light a kind of ongoing aesthetic collage.
Issue twelve offers a case in point, featuring a mix that seeks to challenge expectation, including interviews and excerpts, erasures and recapitulations, poetry and prose, as well as pieces that sit outside or in between narrow definitions of form or discipline to operate through a more elusive lens. Some contributors appeared in our first issue; others we have not published before. We are also bracketing the issue with a pair of selections from the archive of the Southern California Review—the journal from which Air/Light is descended. We digitized these materials in 2021 and 2022 with the assistance of USC Libraries’ Digital Library Collections, where the full archive continues to be housed.
What does it mean to make a magazine at this point in the culture? That’s the question with which we are engaged. Maybe the best analogy is that of the wonder cabinet, a collection of curiosities unbound by conventional categories, in which the only thing we take for granted is our ongoing capacity to be surprised.
