The theme of our first issue is “Conversation,” which captures the dialogue between patients and providers, between the ill and the healers. But conversation captures much more than those real-life medical scenarios. It encapsulates the words we use in our daily lives and, indeed, the very purpose of writing and storytelling itself. Writing is a conversation on paper between the author and the reader, and like oral conversations, written ones fail if no one is listening. Therefore, conversations are an interactive, participatory endeavor, which is why they are the cornerstone of writing.

All writing is full of conversations. Sometimes, it’s a conversation between writers and themselves searching for what it is they want to say, to paraphrase Flannery O’Connor. Writing can be a processing tool, used to understand the world around us—but what good are those observations in isolation? Writing is then used to effect lasting communications, educate others and possibly spur them to action. Many of the pieces in this issue do just that. They portray illness or transplants or death and dying, and through those portrayals we can appreciate life and humanity all the more—its fragility, its temporality.

Writing is a conversation between our current selves and our future self. To restore hope that an improved world does and can exist, if only we imagine it to be. To quote Anaïs Nin:

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me—the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

The works in this issue do this, too, perhaps more in fiction than anywhere else. Characters can die in a manner of their choosing or receive a diagnosis in time. Fiction allows the author to write a new ending, to create a world where transplants take and the recipient literally breathes again and fading actors go out with flair.

While these purposes are admirable, they are not writing’s most crucial aspect. To me, the most important function is the ability to connect people. We connect through conversation by sharing thoughts and ideas and conversation then serves as a point of connection allowing us to deepen our understanding of our fellow human beings. What they feel, what they experience, and who they are. We all have experienced illness, or love, or death, or loss. But we get too distracted in oral conversations to see the threads of humanity that bind us. The act of reading words on the page leads us to become open and receptive, to view a shared humanity. To feel another’s pain and joy. To walk in their shoes. Somehow, through what seems like magic, we drop the pretense of dissimilarity and we become aware of how alike we—people—all are.

As an editor, I thank you for being receptive to these stories. I hope you share in their experiences, look at the real world with a changed perspective, and return to reality with a sense of hope in the future, just as I have.

AM Larks is the fiction editor of Please See Me.