Illumination

Light.  Enlightenment.  Epiphany.  Illustration.  What do you think of when you think of Illumination?  Coming of age stories?  Maybe stories of Americans traveling to the Far East and learning about Buddhism.  That’s possible.  Maybe that’s the story I would have written.  It’s certainly the first thought I had when I thought about a short fictional piece centered on the word Illumination.  But, of course, as artists will do, our contributors in this issue dug deeper than that.  They found nuances of meaning that most of us may not have thought of and they expressed those thoughts in their own creative ways.

As an editor, I enjoy choosing a word and letting other artists define that word for me.  A dictionary has so many limitations.  We like to leave it more open ended.  Using poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual arts and comics, we’re able, collectively, to come up with a definition of the word that could never be conceived of in a dictionary.  Part of that is that we devote twenty-eight pages to it rather than a few lines.  But it’s also that we get so many different views expressed in so many different ways.  It is—dare I say it—illuminating to see how these highly creative people each view and describe the same word.

5x5 has been going strong now for over two years.  If you do an internet search for literary magazines, you’ll find that there are a lot that don’t last a year.  There are also a lot that publish their issues in seemingly random intervals.  We’re proud to say that we publish four issues per year, at the beginning of each season.  And we couldn’t do that without you, the reader and the artist.  For all the work we put into this, it wouldn’t exist without the community of writers, illustrators, photographers, and other various artist, as well as readers and donors.

Thank you all for being a part of this adventure.  I hope you find our latest issue illuminating.