A Letter from Your Editors

When we were halfway done but nowhere near finished with this issue, we began to speak to each other in declarations: the ideas we had would translate to the page. The images we looked for would appear in our searches. Everything will get done.

What is an affirmation, after all, if not a little game we play on our own mind? Our thoughts, reliable for the circuitous routes they prefer to take and surprising for the vengeance they inflict on our moods, are not to be trusted; but our faith in them is not so easily lost. The author Jamie Hood is one of our favorite interpreters of this knowledge—in her “Affirmations in an Emergency,” she shares with us the mantras and mottos that consciously rewrite panic, worry, and even despair into hope, trust, and peace.

Issue 002 is in many ways about such revisions: rewrites and adaptations applied to our own first—or second, or third, or hundredth—conscious thoughts. In the work gathered here, our contributors have taken delicate wrecking balls to all kinds of mind games, gracefully shattering assumptions or elegantly interrogating fears. In our essays, Hannah Black traces her decision to become a mother, Catherine Lacey waits for a tense response from an estranged friend, and Sarah Miller temporarily forgets her own life story. Poet Maggie Millner offers self-portraits from a purgatory of desire, while Callie Siskel communes with a polyamorous alter ego. Our short fiction spans the unravelling motivations of a date by Hannah Gold, surreal scenes of infidelity by Stephen Mortland, and a quest to unearth and decipher a reality-bending video by Mariel Franklin. A portfolio by Torbjørn Rødland displays the disconnections inside close contact. The data journalist Mona Chalabi finds many subtle and sweeping little tweaks to be made in the way we describe ourselves; curator Lou Stoppard collects a portfolio of images from photographers who have captured, in one way or another, forms of control visible under observation. And in the encounters between collaborators we find a whole range of ideas and understandings only possible in the negotiations and excavations good conversation brings: Jamieson Webster and Darian Leader, authors and psychoanalysts, discuss the projections, presumptions. and meanings we impose on sex and sexuality. In their wide-ranging talk, the novelist Garth Greenwell and poet Ralf Webb surface the desire contained in a single sentence.

Our cover story reminds us of another kind of mind game: a dream. The acclaimed photographer Nan Goldin first met our cover star, classic musician and singer-songwriter Kelsey Lu, in 2021, and since then they have taken every opportunity possible to create together. In Nan’s vision, we found Lu in green fields under light skies; we see them performing to their other cover star, the magnificently graceful Arabian horse named Constantine, in a large enclosed ring, and watch them both glow against the dark night. “The exchange between everything, everyone in the room and myself... I want to be open to it,” Lu told Puja Patel in their long talk about art, sound, magic, and love. With the brilliant precision and warm sensitivity Goldin’s portraits have long been known for, we see Lu shine.

A magazine is a quiet medium that loudly resonates, when done right. We wonder what you’ll think of all this; more than that, we wonder how you’ll think of all this. We do want you to love what you see; we will find a way to reach you through these pages. We are making AFM for you. And we will be encountering you here and out in the world very soon.

With the very best thoughts,

The Editors