First published in 1992 by founding editor Alyn Warren, Faultline is UC Irvine’s Pushcart Prize-winning journal. Housed in UC Irvine’s Department of English, Faultline is produced by the graduate students of the Programs in Writing, and publishes an annual issue every spring featuring works of short fiction, poetry, writer interviews, fine art, and translations.
It’s been an honor to work on this issue with our writers and contributors, and before we begin, I’d like to show you a snapshot of our contributors this year, just so you can have an idea of the faces behind the voices on these pages:
[ show slides ]
And tonight we’ll also be displaying the art by our fine artists, Nicole Marcelino, who took the photo that we’ve used as our cover image, Chad Horn, our own MFA administrator, Peggy Reavey, an alumnus of our MFA programs in writing, and Benjamin Weissman, a long-time friend of the program, and a fiction contributor, too!
We are excited for you to hear readings tonight by some of our issue’s contributors: Amy Gerstler, Samantha Colicchio, David Keplinger (virtually!), Benjamin Weissman, and our own Michelle Latiolais. It is not only work from writers like these that we aim to celebrate and turn our attention to tonight, but also, I would like to reflect at the launch of this work of literature on the tremendous value of literature to us all. As you prepare to listen to these authors read, consider the role that literature has played in your own life. The times that you turned to a book because you needed to spend time with another voice, or another life; the times you trusted that a poem would open your heart to a much-needed sense of wonder. The times that you might have felt restless, and sought out a way of seeing things that you had not been able to imagine before in the pages of a book. Comfort in your loneliness, or hope in your desolation. Times that you simply wanted to be entertained, to be held by something. We recognize that literature has power. I’d like to argue that if we are open to it, literature also puts us in touch with the power we each have in ourselves.
In times like these, when we have so much work to do in the world, in a time when the sanctity of life is not a truth universally acknowledged, frankly, we need literature’s reminder that things do not have to be the way they are; we must, against all external directives, look back at the city burning, and we must be energized enough to survive the effort that putting out that fire requires of us. Literature is brought into this world when a writer is brave enough to be utterly present, to their minds, their hearts, and their worlds—and also, to imagine. To think beyond the answers that have already been so conveniently provided to us, to ask the questions that we must actually be asking. We need literature’s immensity to keep us open, and watching, and awake to the multitude of influences at work in our lives, many of which would rather we keep our eyes and our hearts closed. Because writing arises out of imagination, and a radical presence, and a liminal space between minds occupied only by language, and therefore, great possibility, immersing ourselves in literature is one of the only methods we have in this life of escaping, at least momentarily, the demands of this world, and its exploitative arrangements. When we read, we can experience freedom, reunited with the animal of our body and spirit. We experience rest, able to put down, for a moment, our burdens.
When we meet a page, with all expectations held at bay, with the willingness to accompany whatever we might meet there in a story, in a poem, we exercise compassion: to see all of something, to hold room for all of something that is not ourselves in ourselves. And when we experience the wonder, the intensity, the earnestness of the page, and feel how it changes us, feel how it allows us to view the world anew, we commune with our own power, us, beings and agents in this world that we can be, having spent some time reading, energized to engage with in a purposeful manner, not beholden to the presiding ways. And sometimes, too, with the page, we experience heights of worriless-ness and mirth that teach us what we are capable of feeling, and that show us what we should desire to make available to every human being, to every child.
Audre Lorde, Black feminist activist, poet, and writer, wrote of humanity’s ability to feel pleasure as their surest tool in the fight for liberation from the presiding structures of power that were not only not built to serve human need and human rights, but were built in fact to control, to limit, and to weaponize them. Literature not only opens the portal to pleasure—intellectual, physiological, and emotional—in each of us, but it also shows us the human, in all the human’s complexities, messinesses, goodnesses, and graces, and capacities; and we can look at these things in literature in a way we are being asked not to be willing to look at these things in our fellow beings. Therefore I think we need literature. We must be awake to ourselves, and to our world.
If you turn to the first pages of this year’s volume of Faultline, you will find a statement from the editors. I’d like to conclude by reading it to you.
The archives of literature offer themselves to us, their immensity tapping at our lives like the young redwood’s branch tips at the window. And all they ask of us in return is that we open ourselves to whatever we encounter on the page; that we let ourselves be with what the writing asks us to be with; and that when the writing speaks, we listen.
Thank you all so much for being here, for supporting us, and for celebrating this work of literature with us. I can’t wait for you to hear these readings, and later, to spend some time with these pages.