A Note from the Editor: Issue 40

Welcome to the SICK issue –

aka the one that made the entire team, rather prophetically, pretty sick in producing it. Our issue was delayed a week and we experienced everything from poor mental health to food poisoning to power cuts among our team across the world. Sometimes, we eerily laugh at how our themes somehow preempt real life events. Remember the Apocalypse issue? Just mere months away from the start of the pandemic…

Regardless, we’re proud to have put this issue out and looking forward to one more (Tea) after this before we take another break (exciting announcements as to why that is, coming soon).

When we came up with this theme, like the rest, we were excited by the many different routes of interpretation creators could take when approaching “sick”. There’s obvious ideas of illness, such as we see with work that explores chronic illness, medication, and orthopedic treatment, and then there are more abstract perspectives, through the lenses of grief, loss, and heartbreak.

More colloquially, the descriptor of “sick” can mean something that’s dope, that’s really, just, cool, and sometimes that might be as wacky as a woman imagining killing her husband to finally get his hefty inheritance. What I love about the idea of “sick” is that it pushes against what we consider “normal” or “conventional”, and sometimes that means confronting disgusting, ugly or even just plain different things to what you normally think or hold as acceptable and correct. Sick pushes the boundaries of your point of view, and that, of course, makes it very “Postscript.” And the age-old argument: the very idea of pushing at the edges of thought is exactly what the act of creation and artmaking is all about.

Even if you don’t like what you see here, I hope it makes you think. Maybe you’ll frown and scrunch up your face at first, but then you might pause and say “Unless…?”

That would be sick.

Love,
Vamika