Editor’s Introduction

After two completed volumes of QTR, two things feel crystal clear: The work of this journal has never been more important.The work of this journal has only become more difficult.To state the obvious: It is hard to meet deadlines when your life and livelihood are under attack.It is fraught to set those timelines, to ask for reviews, reports, revisions, decisions, edits, or bios, to try to do more labor individually and collectively, written or otherwise, when so many academics, activists, and artists (and the many who are more than one of these) are negotiating persistent or rising threats.All around us, colleagues, friends, and loved ones are being stretched to their limits, pushed around, down, and out of their communities, or just pulled apart by antagonistic and exploitative forces.The pace of accelerating authoritarianism generates sensations of fear, panic, anxiety, and overwhelm, while creating the conditions where we are running from crisis to crisis to crisis, one often compounding another.Not so coincidentally, multiple members of our editorial team have been struck by illness, injury, and loss over these past months.But to acknowledge the impact of these forces and our losses is far from a negation of the other aspects of our lives together, which still contain joy and creativity and connection and remembrance and resistance.Beyond these latest inflection points, then, we know that things will turn, as Amina Shumake and Jeanine Viau, the journal's creative submissions coeditors, highlight in "On Turning," their reintroduction of QTR Creative.In this piece, Shumake and Viau provide an extended reflection on their curatorial approach and this current moment for queer and trans artistry and creativity.This peek into their process stresses that doing this kind of crafting counters both reduction and erasure.To them, turning is not only a motif in many of the creative works the journal has featured, but it is also a method for the refusal of erasure and estrangement and for the recovery of loss.The approach they outline registers the fierce urgency of our times even as it invites us to turn to unsettling projects of reckoning with a repository in need of more intimate or engaged remembrance.Such a reckoning shows that queer and trans people have long been targeted by death-dealing forces.