I discovered the freedom in being ignored back in elementary school, notably during compulsory games of dodgeball, in which the majority of the class would stand in a circle and take turns throwing the ball at a handful of kids at the center, trying to hit them and knock them out of the game. When it was my turn to be in the middle, I found that if I just stood quietly around the edges instead of darting around, the throwers would forget about me. I could watch from a safe distance and outlast the more obvious targets. Eventually, however, the game would come down to one hotshot player and me, the silent imposter whose jig was up. It was embarrassing to be suddenly at the center, but I could quickly put an end to it all by stepping in the way of the next throw.

It was when nobody was paying attention that I felt most free to do the things I loved—to observe, reflect, daydream, and not get hit by flying objects. Reading fiction, and later writing and studying literature, offered other ways to move and think freely without attracting attention. It’s no wonder I found my way to literary magazine publishing, a corner of the world that is vital to its participants but largely ignored by everyone else. Getting started in publishing and writing in the ’90s, I’ve always taken for granted that the work I did would be ignored by the general public, and especially by the government. 

To imagine literary art as dangerous in this country, no matter how critical it is of power or dominant cultural standards, seemed to me preposterous or even hopelessly self-aggrandizing. Poets around the world and throughout history have been and continue to be silenced, exiled, and even murdered for their writing—but not here, where they’re more likely to be ignored. Here, the written word is protected by law. This is one of our country’s most foundational principles. Or so we thought. But the recent increase in book banning, threats to imprison librarians who distribute the “wrong” books, and of course the arrests, supposedly on immigration charges, of students who have expressed the “wrong” opinions have shaken that foundation. This policing now extends to the lit mag world, not by arrest but by the censorship that will result from the withdrawal of previously approved and budgeted funds from hundreds of literary and arts organizations, including ours. Never mind that it’s illegal for the executive branch to impound congressionally approved grants. Once one law is flagrantly broken by the people who pledged to uphold it, all laws are in danger. And if the center cannot hold, neither can the edges.

A little over a year ago, when we started planning for this summer’s international feature, we chose El Salvador for the usual combination of reasons, not for a desire to jump into the political spotlight. We wanted to gather work by writers from a place we hadn’t often featured in the magazine, and give readers a chance to learn from their ways of seeing, their cultural and geographical influences, and even their strategies of craft. And, perhaps most importantly, we found just the right person to edit this feature: the poet Alexandra Lytton Regalado, who has been translating and publishing Salvadoran writers for decades. We didn’t know much about the current state of El Salvador, apart from the dominant political narrative and the stark, photojournalistic images from the civil war of the 1980s. So we were hoping our international feature would get under the skin, disrupt the stories about murder rates and the shiny new Bitcoin City, and illuminate our understanding as only literary writing can. 

But then, “Oopsie . . . Too late,” posted the Salvadoran president, when in March hundreds of people were put on a plane for deportation to a prison in El Salvador without due process and the DC Circuit court ordered the plane turned around. Instead of standing up for the law, our secretary of state simply reposted the remarks. What was going on here? Some Salvadoran writers have already had to leave the country for their own safety, but suddenly legal protection in this country also feels less assured. Whereas just a few months ago we would have assumed we could write and publish anything we thought had literary and intellectual value, now we have to wonder: who is safe, and what is protected, and how did we get here so fast?

Alex provides a beautiful invocation of the place she loves and the tenacity of its writers. Those writers in turn give us a chance to see beyond that country’s prisons—to the remembered past, the imagined future, the poetry, and the parables. This feature of eighteen Salvadoran writers and their translators is nested within the work of fifteen English-language writers, each of whom presents a vision for how story, image, and inquiry can move the reader into unexpected places. Coming from such different geographical and linguistic origins, they create, together, a crackling summer issue full of births and deaths, blood and eggs, rockets and ferns.

Authoritarianism has always been antithetical to literature, which questions what we’re told and how to think. Even when it’s being ignored, literature works as a tool for freedom: freedom to create, reflect, observe, tell the truth, and imagine; freedom from “the tyranny of the present.” But when the margins no longer offer cover, when you’re no longer invisible but vulnerable at the center, then what? Like in dodgeball, is it preferable to concede? To dodge and continue to play by the rules, or walk away from the game entirely? Maybe the metaphor ends here, because when it comes to writing, publishing, and the work of NER, we plan to stay in the game as long as possible.

—CK

Subscribe to Read More