We post this issue amid a political season as chilling as any January wind. The nation is choosing a new president and, given the demagoguery in the air, if we choose badly, we may be jolted into an era few of us have imagined possible. Too many Americans daydream that we live outside of history. We do not.
Reckless candidates shooting their mouths off to appeal to our worst, most irrational fears offer a future we would not want to inhabit.
And so what part does literature and our little magazine have to play in any of this? Saul Bellow once said that art has the ability “to arrest our attention in the midst of distraction.” The discipline of reading and writing is an exercise in stopping and turning off the noise around ourselves to think, to consider, to feel more deeply and, we hope, more humanely.
We offer Boomer Lit Mag as a thoughtful oasis, a place where your attention will be arrested for a time: Remembering the past, all too aware of the present, looking to the future; neither as nostalgia nor wishful thinking, but as a mindful consideration of what is and what might be. Beyond that, it is a place to come together in community as writers and readers around our differences as well as around what we hold in common.
We hope the primary and general election voters turn off the noise around themselves and stop to more generously consider the intentions of those who exploit their fears and the not-exactly-latent racist strains still haunting our culture. We hope you hear in these pages the singing of our better angels. They are there, we promise, but we all have to listen for them.
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