Foreword

One is reminded of the importance of the written word when death lurks in the corners. The other day, we were discussing the block many people have between the thoughts in their heads and the blank page. Ask someone to speak on a topic, and they can go on for minutes, exhausting hundreds, thousands of words in the process. Ask the same person to then write down what they said, and they’ll give you a befuddled look. The enormity of a blank page, the prospect of having to fill in all that space with the monologue of their inner world, scares them.

Yet, for most people who are not famous, writing down their thoughts is the primary way for a greater percentage of the world to ever know what they feel, in detail, about the big, and even the little, things in life. Death being one of the big things. Serious injury, global conflict, environmental catastrophe. Or even happier subjects like the birth of a child, getting a job they always wanted, traveling to strange and new places. Wining a local competition, running into a friend they hadn’t seen in years. The clouds flaming orange and red in the last rays of a sunset, the deep blue of an early morning sky, the electric gray before a coming storm.

It’s through the written word that we can confirm that others are human, that they feel in ways similar as us, that they are conscious. We can learn their joys and griefs, their frustrations and hopes, their fears and what they are confident about. Writing bridges gaps between humans in a way that’s singularly unique. The written word has a staying power that outlasts goodbyes, whether temporary or permanent. A picture may be a thousand words, a video a hundred million words, but neither will let someone know the complete five senses a person experienced like the written word allows. Smell, touch, taste are often lost in photos and videos, yet exist in abundance on the page.

We at Samjoko are acolytes of the written word. We praise it and do all we can to lift it up so that more can see the light our contributors seek to spread out over the world.

As always, we ask that visitors to our magazine help us hold up the flame a little higher and let it shine a little brighter through donations to our Patreon and/or BuyUsCoffee. We currently have only one steady patreon, LowKeyWorlde, who has maintained his monthly patronage issue after issue. We are on our fifth year of publication heading into our sixth, and we have no intention of stopping anytime soon. Help us help other writers reveal fragments of their souls through poetry fiction, non-fiction, art, photography.

And with that, welcome to the Summer Issue V 2025 of Samjoko Magazine.