Dear Readers,
We blinked, and somehow it’s time for another issue! Before we tell you all about it, we want to share an incredible announcement: “The Frankly Impossible Weight of Han” by Maria Dong, from our very first issue, has been selected for 2022’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, guest edited by Rebecca Roanhorse. It joins an absolutely stellar lineup—you can read all of these stories starting November 1, 2022!
And now, we are thrilled to bring you Issue 2 from our second volume. In these pages you’ll find houses and homes, collections and inheritances. Among them: a struggling restaurant that serves sin; a child trying to fulfill her mother’s dying wish; a snake that threatens to expose a family’s secrets. A week away at a house in suburbia with a strange mirror; a weekend spent with a man who consumes words. Each of these stories is as delectable as it is haunting.
While we always include content warnings with our stories, we would like to emphasize their relevance here. This is probably our heaviest issue to date, not just in terms of word count (almost 20,000 words!) but in terms of themes and content.
Even as you enjoy this issue, we hope you’re keeping an eye on the horizon. Our next submission period runs from July 1–31; we’ll be accepting stories on the theme of music, however you choose to interpret that. We can’t wait to read your beautiful words.
Finally, we’re just wrapping up story selection for Issue 2.3. With this issue comes a new batch of talent working behind the scenes. Kanika Agrawal joins Rowan as a fiction editor. She’s passionate about speculative writing that blurs genres and experiments with form. We’ve also welcomed Aaron Voigt, Evalyn Broderick, K. S. Walker, Kelsea Yu, Prosper Ifeanyi, Sachiko Ragosta, and S. R. Westvik to our team of First Readers starting from the next issue! We are so thrilled to be working with this fantastic, thoughtful group of individuals.
As always, thank you for your support and for reading these stories. We hope you love them as much as we do.
With excitement,
Kanika Agrawal, Aleksandra Hill, and Rowan Morrison