It is incorrect to say that all people are the same. The stories collected in this issue of kiosk demonstrate that everyday people can be quite strange and hard to fathom. It is the role of these narratives to help us to understand these others, to get inside their hearts and learn about their most intimate choices and motivations.
So many of this issue’s stories focus on the inner workings of social hierarchies of many kinds, from those of the sorority pledge class in Apphia Freeman’s “The Game of Acceptance”; to the intricately programmed government of the beehive in Soraya King’s “Other Nations”; to Jason Davis’s Army combat unit. These stories show how curious we are about how others live, and how hard it is to gain a privileged view of others’ real lives. And when we can, how exciting and revealing it is to see things from an insider's perspective.
What does it mean to take a subject’s inner thoughts and drives and project them into the outside world? This task is what our writers have achieved again and again with their tireless reporting, observations, and carefully wrought narratives. It is not easy to do, and yet it is something so valuable to obtain: the benefit of truly understanding another, of putting a human face on human beings. As author Ryon Tanara points out, he initially approached his subject to understand why a a tragic event had occurred, but ended up writing about the human relationship that was central to his subject's life. The relationship became the story. Similarly, in Charisma Madarang's profile of a family of proud fishermen hanging on to their past, we are able to understand how their profession is as much about their family as it is about a job. We hope these stories of connection and relationship are as interesting to read as they were for our authors to discover and write.
patricia pierson
december 2011
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