Editors’ Letter: A Collaboration Between the Past and Future

We were born in summer (6)

Lena Ziegler: July 1988 in a since-abandoned Pennsylvania hospital. 
Erin Slaughter: August 1993 in a since-renamed Nevada hospital. 
The Hunger: July 2017 in a since-boarded up Kentucky Starbucks.

Wreck us we begged. Make us throw our mouths open to the sky. We knew only that we wanted to be destroyed (1)

We must ask you, now, reader
is all creation

telling new stories about the same suffering (10)

a collaboration between

growing up and growing young (2) 

a past

all sex-sext-sexy, all unsolicited dick pics, all rage, all bubbly, all smiles like smiles are currency (3) 

and future?

We breathe in, release, and our old lives float, somehow, away (5) 

Or is creation a collaboration between two people popping their heads through the surface of an unkind, violent sea, gasping for the same fresh air? 

Gasping, and while looking for the shore, instead catching the hungry eye of another like you.

In the wildness of bloom and color (5)

we found

a safe somewhere to run to (9)

The Hunger.

A literary journal focused on showcasing the kind of work that could ripple through you like orgasm or tragedy (1)

Not that hunger.
Don’t forget —

we met as hungry women (2) 

We met as hungry women.

So let’s talk about journeys (3)

Let’s talk about them. 

When does a history actually start? (6)

In the beginning.

When we began The Hunger, our lives looked very different from the ways we live inside of them now (3) 

Earlier. Younger. Both of us mirrors, broken, breaking.

As graduate students and restless travelers—(4) 

Nope. 

We met as hungry women (2) 

We met as hungry women. 
The hunger predates the rest.  

If we met at fifteen or sixteen, would we have given each other and ourselves the permission to be angry, alive and reckless? (2)

What kind of a question is that? 

How many times have you roamed the street horny and desperate for the echo of footsteps around you to become someone’s other than your own? (4)

Too many times, but we know this already. 

We met as hungry women (2)

But we came into the world already hungry, and horny, and aching. 

There are conflicting stories we tell ourselves, and that the world tells us about ourselves (3)

For example: we were born in the mangled roots of a hollowed tree,

happy fucking birthday (3)

waiting to be invited in. 

We came together, roamed a forest of burnt orange and believed in each other long enough to keep moving forward (9)

We never needed permission, from each other, or anyone, to be wild, or ugly, or red-faced or howling.

To howl is to feel language turn us bloody and translucent, to be reminded we are alive in one violent exhale (1)

Our howl was collective and inescapable, predating everything, binding us with tattered rope. 

A life raft. To catch the eye of the person gasping for air alongside you, recognizing more than thirst in the keening cave of their mouth, like it could suckle the blue from the sky.

We were hot-skinned, angry, and feasting. 

We met as hungry women (2) 

It’s been six years. But you know that by now.

It’s unignorable, and lately more troubling than ever (6)

We wouldn’t say that. In fact, we are thriving. We need much less to fill us; we have learned to hoard our stomachs with the kind of full that stays. 

Struggling with body image, self-worth, the spiritual angst of determining what matters and what doesn’t… (7)

Well, sure. But that’s inevitable. 

The shameless gluttony of feeding, clinging, hoarding, barricading… (8)

Must we go there again? 
And again? 
And again?

But then, the universal question persists: what else would we talk about? (7)

Has every conversation been had? Every angst come of age? Every beast been embodied? Every haunting invited to the new seasons of our lives, no longer all that frightening? 

We know life’s hurtling forward has always been inevitable… (10) 

That word again. Inevitability, like hunger, too demanding or consistent to turn away from, and yet, here we are six years later.

the machine of the future beginning to stir awake can sound frightening (10)

But there is more to say, isn’t there? There’s always more to say. 

We are still alive and we are screaming, both silently and together (8)

More eloquent than ever, don’t you think?  

We tell ourselves everything we’re doing now will make for a good story or poem someday (12) 

A life philosophy to live by, predating us, Lena and Erin, predating The Hunger.

This is the power behind literature and art: creating records of our survival (10)

We’ve survived so much, separately and together. Do you remember 

weekly phone calls, howling over submissions, live-reading with each other, sharing in the delight of a brand new issue to fill with incredible work (5)

And then 

Our world kept misaligning…time kept shifting before us (5)

But the question still persists: what else could we talk about? 

For years we begged every fuck, every touch, every unreciprocated orgasm to reveal itself as a validation of worth (7)

This again… 

And the trembling fear of getting older, we ask ourselves, what does it mean to be writers or women? (7)

You mean beyond the hunger? 

and the selves we outgrow and discover, of the never-ending exploration inside (2)

There is so much left to birth into being.

Art and creativity are often referred to as a kind of mothering, too: gathering the millions of little pieces of life that swirl around us (6)

And yet

There is grief in the growing, but there is also a shaky joy in stepping (2)

away from the hunger, though gnawing, and inevitable. 

Whether that change is a quiet whisper inside… or a proud pronouncement to the world, we choose to honor the bravery in forever trying (9)

But then what about The Hunger? 
It’s as much about you—

how many of you have come to trust us with your words, work, art, and selves, hoping for open mouths, loving nods, and howling reaction to all you’ve shared with us (7)

as it is ourselves, as it is each other.

All that is left to trust is the certainty that there is no end, no beginning, just the silly imperfect middle (7)

We told you once 

we want to believe in magic (11)

and we do. We’ve experienced it for six years and thirteen issues.  

We read your work with time and attention, in bedrooms, hotel rooms, cabins, airports (7)

old apartments, grad school housing, new homes, faculty offices

All over the country. Chicago, Arkansas, Memphis, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina (7)

Pennsylvania, New York, Seattle, South Carolina.

When it’s all over, were we the magicians or the fire? (11)

When it’s all over, what will we hold onto? 

Humans doused in the wrong kind of light (3) 

So, let’s talk about journeys. We met as hungry women. We remain hungry women. Nothing is different, yet everything has changed. When we launched The Hunger, we sought to know the difference between finding in the work what we need and finding work itself that is needed (4). You could say The Hunger represents the collective of everything we need and everything that remains pivotal to our humanity: brokenness, silliness, anger, and heartbreak, bloody stumps and gurgling bellies. This describes, in simplest terms, what we envisioned The Hunger would become: a place to howl. To let art break and rebuild you. To feed off of the same inspiration that we, as writers and readers and lovers of this vast and unsettling world, also find in these pieces (1). 

The world remains hungry and so The Hunger remains in the world. Though we are closing this chapter, the stories and voices we’ve highlighted over the years will stay here, in this journal, to both return and escape to. Which is to say, there is something important about paying tribute to the places that made you (5). And for the last six years, you, our beloved readers and contributors, made The Hunger what it is today. And for this collaboration between past and future, between writer and reader, between the two of us, we thank you for every gasp, every howl, every laugh, and every whimper.

Wreck us, we begged.
To howl is to feel (1). 
A new way of being in the world (2). 
The struggles are so often what bring us to our knees (3). 
This is why we present to you a collection of literary hauntings (4). 
There is no loyalty to someone else’s memories, and there shouldn’t be (5). 
Maybe we are all destined to destroy that from which we came (6). 
Humanity is resilient in its beauty, rage, and injustice (7). 
This is when we stop asking permission to be heard (8). 
Continue to create your way into existence (9). 
So many of life’s questions come back to creation (10). 
In this there is magic (11). 
Fantasy is what we live for (12). 

And the hunger persists, it persists, it persists.