I am so grateful to have been guest editor for this issue of Apparition Lit – it’s an absolute favorite publication of mine, always satisfying my hunger for a variety of the speculative, the slipstream, and the strange. As we worked through the submissions for this issue, it was exhilarating to ask questions about satisfaction and what satisfaction means. The questions are existential: what brings satisfaction, in mind, body, and spirit? The questions are also editorial: what brings satisfaction in reading a story, poem, or essay? I’ve realized that it’s an important element in how we read and what resonates with us. It cajoles and consoles us in equal measure.
To what extent does satisfaction require a sense of truth, justice, coherence, pleasure, or alignment? There are times where satisfaction is the right thing in the right place. It presents a universe that makes sense, that looks or feels good, that somehow acts “correctly”. But there are also ways in which satisfaction meets the incomplete: something is “satisfactory”, something is sufficient for a purpose, and the pleasure we derive from it is tied to that purpose.
As you read this issue, you’ll encounter work that falls into a coherent universe and other work where there is satisfaction in purpose and the incomplete. Still others will vacillate between the two. Where satisfaction may immediately call to mind food, sex, and revenge, our selections in this issue will take you to the places where completion, desire, and tension meet.
In A Bird Always Wants More Mangoes, we tangle with isolation and consumption. The Gorgon’s Epitaphist asks us what completion means. Sunrise, Sunrise, Sunrise examines desire in what seems inevitable. You Do What You’re Told demands an assertion of the self. The poems Dream Weaver and My Internal Advisor interrogate the shape of reality. Meandering Through Definitions of Satisfaction both defines and declines to define, looking at where satisfaction can be found in speculative fiction, in resisting oppression, and in dreaming.
May this issue give you bold answers, thrilling questions, and provide what is demanded. May it captivate you with strange worlds and comfort you with beautiful words. May it meander through meaning and give dimension to how we define.
May it satisfy.
Tiffany Morris
Apparition Literary Magazine
Guest Editor, Satisfaction Issue
Tiffany Morris is a Mi’kmaw horror/speculative poet from K’jipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia. She is the author of chapbooks Havoc In Silence (Molten Molecular Minutiae, 2019) and It Came From Seca Lake! Horror Poems from Sweet Valley High (Ghost City Press, 2019). She can be found on twitter @tiffmorris or at tiffmorris.com.
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Thank you for reading,
