A Letter From the Editors
Jessie Leitzel | Homing | Special Issue 2026
Homing’s most common usage was for carrier pigeons, back when their speed and instinct were our fastest method of crossing distance. Its oldest is for ship architecture, when a boat’s two walls curve inwards to meet at the stern: ‘the sides homing into a point.’ Homing birds, homing-time and now, homing devices. Creatures with internal compasses pointed towards return.
I’ve come to believe that writing, and making art in general, is inextricably tied to home. Call it habit, call it the poet’s pull towards place—we are invested in the physical world because our art is inspired by it. Every moment has to happen somewhere, and the mountain ranges, the boulevards, the elbows and mouths come to map an internal geography. Writers wish both to house and be housed by all of these definitions; we are homing creatures, in the adjective sense. We are defined by our need to return, and are paralyzed when we fail to.
This is the shortcoming of using homing as an adjective: it describes ability, something that’s inherent, that cannot be trained. Our writing captures the abstract, re-paints childhood scenes, bridges gaps of time and distance; when it fails to do so, everything caves. How can we encompass all the cities, states and avenues in our memory? How can we go back to that friend’s college apartment, that log cabin in Vermont, that south Atlanta suburb strata? How can we both keep and be kept by the places that have made us who we are?
But returning home is a movement as well as an instinct; it was to prove this that “Homing” was created. Co-edited by Sophia Stadalsky, this issue features twelve artists and writers speaking to various versions of place, whether those be man-made, geographical, or human. Seth Sawyer’s “Back at the Colony” pulls us into the Virginia foothills while Manola Silva-Hanson’s “Nos Vemos Despúes” turns our eyes towards journeying. The adrenaline-stagnancy of Ava Dawson’s “Legacy” converses with Danielle DeTiberus’s self-portrait. Audie Waller’s interview coins the term ‘home-people,’ one of my favorite hyphenated compounds to date. And Sean Scapellato’s final lines at once leave us untethered and definitively rooted. What this issue does, I believe, is offer; by making the journey home for us, these artists prove we’re able to do the same.
As someone ever-honing their own sense of place, this publication is both a dream and a necessity. Some of the voices in these pages are mentors; all of them are dear friends. They’ve helped me when my own home seemed undefinable. This issue shows that, as Grace Talusan notes, ‘homing’ is also a verb. It describes an action that does not stop. Like the bird, circling in on its coordinates. Like the shipmast, ‘barreling, tumbling home.’ And us, the artists, ‘(something) that goes home.’ That must try.