I have a complicated relationship with the number thirteen. When I was young, I wholeheartedly bought into a triskaidekaphobia so prevailing that it seemed like nothing so much as common sense. Buildings that rose high enough had no thirteenth floor, but jumped instead—as if by will or magic—from twelfth to fourteenth. It was considered bad luck to sit thirteen people at a table; one, or so it was said, would die within a year. The origins of these superstitions are cloudy, and may or may not have to do with patriarchal thinking: a resistance to the lunar cycle, which is associated with women’s energy. In time, I came to develop my own set of rites and rituals around the number, including the way I engage with literature. To this day, I always read chapters twelve, thirteen, and fourteen of a book without stopping, as if to nullify the number altogether, to counteract any negative effect.

The irony is that, in recent years, I have come to embrace thirteen, choosing to regard it as an emblem of fortune instead. Why? In part, I suppose, it has to do with resisting that patriarchal impulse—which demands black-and-white, right or wrong, good luck or bad luck. My sense of the number no longer fits within that structure: rather, it feels liminal, like an in-between space. Think about all those missing thirteenth floors. Where did they all go? Somewhere in the multiverse they must find form or dimension. They cannot simply be erased. The older I get, the more such porousness appeals to me. It is the porousness of all we do not know. Summer feels that way as well: a season when things slow down or open, a season when time itself seems to spread. It feels fitting to me, then, that this new issue of Air/Light—yes, the thirteenth—should launch during the summer. Indeed, the material we’ve gathered is itself somehow liminal, in between, featuring as it does conversations, hybrid work, dispatches, meditations on birth and gender and loss.

Such a space, it should go without saying, is where literature and art live, like another invisible storey in a world defined by hierarchies. It is here we get to ask the questions, a process made more necessary by the fact that we cannot—can never—know the answers, that the inquiry is all we have. It is here that we get to reveal ourselves and, in so doing, to connect. This connection emerges not from what we know but from what we don’t. Why else, after all, engage in the work? No, art arises from a kind of compulsion. It is an itch that can never be completely scratched. If you can walk away from a piece, I tell students, then you should do so. What I mean is that the only art that matters is that which will not leave us alone. As to why that is … well, here again, we find ourselves in the realm of touch, in the realm of feeling.

Here again, we find ourselves inhabiting the in-between.

I’m interested in how things change, how they develop. I’m interested in the questions those processes provoke. I’m interested in the number thirteen, which animates, in its own loose way, this issue. Not as a guiding principle so much as a state of being, a point of view, a perspective on the world.