Last quarter, my co-editor, Zach Jacobs, introduced our selections with his reflections on worldwide natural disasters, starting with the view from his apartment window of Houston’s post-hurricane flooding, Highway 288 becoming “a long, slow-flowing river.”

Today as I write, wild fires burn through the Los Angeles area, massive crimson blazes racing down toward the highways, closing down parts of the iconic 405 Freeway, and endangering homes, humans, and wildlife. I don’t live there, but my daughter does.

Our world is perilous—in ways that we often cannot predict, in ways that we cannot control. How do we deal with this perilous world that we inhabit?

Our authors this month each share pieces that grapple with dangers of the world—both inside and outside of ourselves. A fatal plane crash. A life-threatening eating disorder. An acute brain injury. Police brutality.

We all have stories to tell of the dangers that we have faced. Each time we hear these stories, especially told as poignantly and as creatively as these authors have, we gain in strength and in knowledge, so that we too can face the dangers in our lives—and possibly even craft them into works of beauty.

This quarter, Zach and I thank Jessica Clements, Ben Greenlee, Christopher Rabley, and Jennifer Lang for allowing us to publish their work, and hope that you will find their pieces as moving as we have.

Marianne Woods Cirone
Creative Nonfiction Editor
The Citron Review