Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology

Foreword
Collaboration: working together to effect social, political and personal change.

Everywhere we go in the world, we bring ourselves and our histories. We are both exhilarated and cautioned by differences we see in climates, customs, ideologies and people, and we build walls of protection to keep us safe in our hermetic hometowns. Yet, as writers and readers, we can see beyond those walls. Through the lenses of metaphor and image, focus and association, we can see the inner connections between peopleinfrastructures of common experience that go beyond first appearances. The world becomes smaller and less intimidating when we name our truths and discover that our neighbors share them. Through collaboration, we create new pathways of understanding. Everywhere is Someplace Else is the 15th in a series of issue-based anthologies published by Plain View Press. This powerful new collection examines Spirit, Earth, Justice, The Other, Community, Work, Creatures, Time, Death, Love and Creativity through the eyes of eleven poets and storytellers who gathered in Port Aransas, Texas, to collaborate and create a stunning celebration of life and the creative process. The book was assembled in a week of intensive collaboration, a process which influenced everyone's vision. After a year-long call for entry during which the press reviewed more than 250 inquiries and submissions, the writers came together to make a book. We brought computers, manuscripts, craft and idealism, and gathered as collaborators whose aim was to learn from each other. We read aloud, found common ideas and decided to weave our voices together in pursuit of meaning. Each writer became editor for one section of the book, selected work, wrote an introduction, and interviewed his or her colleagues to expand understanding. The collaborative process ebbed and flowed as prolifically as the waves did just past our gulf-side porch. Cover and book design emerged from things at hand, under the skillful guidance of visual artist/writer Christine Valentine Reising, whose specialty is facilitating collaborative art installations. Kalamu ya Salaam, whose name means pen of peace, served as computer mentor to everyone. Each person's skills and good will, generously given, made the project work. There was much hard work and much to celebratea starfish on the beach, a thousand typos, an old road map, dirty dishes, hard-working hands, fresh fish, grocery shopping, a wild-life preserve, laundry, an astounding double rainbow, art, each other. We explored global and ecological concerns in our multi-cultural cocoon, enjoyed diversity of experience and cultural milieu. The writers and artists, all well-represented in national publications, include a New York cab driver, a Michigan letter carrier and union activist, a New Orleans writer and arts producer, an exhibiting visual artist from Michigan, an award-winning poet and professor at Arkansas State University, an award-winning writer from Florida, a Houston global-change scientist, a Michigan business owner, an Austin community activist and pastor, and two writer/editors (Bright & LaGattuta). The group includes members of five of the worlds major religions. What Plain View Press has found in the process of creating, along with family and friends, a network of writers, artists and readers, is that community sustains us. Our best art comes from healing its pain. Our readers are an extended community of people all over the world who work every day to change ideas and institutions that are destroying the planet. The anthologies in the New Voices Series in many ways are the product of all we know about the soul of the writer, how it grows from community and gives back to it, how teaching is at the heart of what the artist does best, how a circle of voices is often the truth of the poem, how meaning is created because we need it.