Editor’s Note
Summer 2026 - Issue 36
I’m writing this amidst days of unbearable heat in Northern Italy, in a house without air conditioning that, I know full well, would never have needed it in the past. We live in uncertain times, and things around us are rapidly changing in a direction that often feels unknown and daunting.
Our relationship to change is personal and sometimes difficult to navigate, and each of us probably has our own never-ending dialogue with it. For example, I’m writing this note for the first time as the Editor-in-Chief of Orion’s Belt, only now beginning to realise the change that this role has had on me and, above all, the change that has been ongoing at the magazine over the past year. I’ve been lucky to be surrounded by a fantastic, hardworking, and very talented team, but facing new things can nevertheless still feel uncertain and scary.
When I feel unrooted, I go back to fiction and poetry. “Stories are medicine,”[1] said Clarissa Pinkola Estés, and they do not require anything but that we listen.1 Going back over and over to a piece of writing I love helps me feel grounded. However, I realise that in doing so, I'm holding onto the hope that this act of returning will each time reveal something new.
Recently, I read something about change that really stuck with me, which is its relation to openings. Author and tarot reader Jessica Dore, in her Substack newsletter[2], while talking about the repetition of reading the same tarot cards over and over, says: “The thing I like about these repetitions is that it never feels like a closed circle. There’s always an opening, a spiral that swirls all on its own because change is constant. Even something as static as a text has a life of its own, but that life is lived by being looked at.”[3]
Reading is not a sterile, repetitive act, and stories are not lifeless texts. Every time we decide to bear witness to another person’s worldview through their writing, we create openings for something new to emerge and transform us.
The voices of the stories and poems in this issue are powerful and transformative. They invite us to look inside ourselves and at the world around us, at the grief, violence, and destruction we allow to happen, but also at the hope, love, and strength we all carry, and with which we can change things and perhaps head in a different direction. Returning to each of these pieces has opened me up to new possibilities and perspectives.
And this is my wish for you as well.
I hope that you will read and return to the potency of these pieces and allow them to move you in ways you could not have foreseen, to encounter a vision you may never have considered before, and that they gift you with the awareness that openings exist all around us, if we remember to listen and bear witness to the world.
I hope you fall in love with these stories and poems. Happy reading.
Gessica Sakamoto Martini
[1] Estés, C. P. (1992). Women who run with the wolves: Myths and stories of the Wild Woman archetype. Ballantine Books.
[2] Dore, J. Offerings. https://jessicadore.substack.com
[3] Dore, J. (2026). Unmortifying oneself. Offerings. https://jessicadore. substack.com/p/unmortifying-oneself
