We speak of it as if it were a place with a particular geography. Notice the valleys you might fall into or might climb out of. Are you the one who will peer over the rim? It’s a location avoidable by luck or omission: follow directions and make no wrong turns. 

 

Or it’s not a place at all—it’s an object that is sticky, undesirable, rotted by shame. It’s a posture. A position. A person.

 

But our language doesn’t always match the lived experience. That’s the trouble with trouble. 

 

Collected here are stories that claim trouble as opportunity. 

 

Here are stories about bodies and food; images of the sky above our heads and the ground beneath our feet. Here are stories that linger in the unspoken space between affliction and expectation. Stories that affirm why we need to talk more about shelter and avoidance. They ask us to pay attention to what might have been and what thankfully was not. They allow for the possibility that trouble might be the very thing that saves you. 

 

Trouble agitates, and there is something about this disturbance that changes who we are and where we stand in this world. Tell me, who is it you want to be?

—Nina Lohman, Publisher