Dear Readers,
I want to begin, as I always do, with a confession: editing this magazine never stops feeling like an act of faith and that too coming from a trained scientist and an atheist is perhaps something. Every month, strangers from every corner of the world send us the most unguarded parts of themselves — a memory, a grief, a joke, a photograph of a fox in the back garden — and trust that we will hold it carefully. This June, that trust arrived in extraordinary abundance, and I have spent the past days doing the only thing an editor can honestly do with such generosity: sitting with it, reading it properly, and trying to understand what this issue is actually telling us about the world right now.
What it tells us, again, is something I keep coming back to with every issue: that empathy survives even where the headlines insist it shouldn't, that love persists in times that reward hatred, and that collaboration across race, religion, geography and political conviction is not a slogan — it is simply what happens, quietly, whenever people are given the room to write honestly.
The issue covers a range of topics and I am just sharing a few for all of you to read and read beyond.
Peter Cordwell gave us two pieces this month, and together they say something rather lovely about what an essay can do. In Catford Through and Through, he takes us back to a working-class childhood in 1950s South East London — the playground at "Foster Park," a father freshly home from the Chindits in Burma carrying malaria for life, a grammar school rejection that turned a boy into "a rebel ever since," and a winding road through cricket, football and journalism that somehow ends in a song about a park called Up Foster Park. It is funny, self-deprecating, and quietly moving — the kind of essay that makes you grateful someone bothered to write their own small history down before it disappeared. Then, in Herbert's Guitar, Peter does something braver: he tells a story about a night that never actually happened — a lonely teenager in a Soho pub, a German girl who stood him up, a guitarist quietly tuning up in the corner — only to admit, at the very end, that the whole beautiful, halting scene was invented "inside my head." It is a story about loneliness disguising itself as nostalgia, and about how we sometimes have to imagine the connection we didn't get to have. I won't spoil who Herbert turns out to be; go and read it, and then go and find the song he tells you to find.
Jean Harvey's essay A Very Foxy Story is, on its surface, simply an account of the urban foxes who wandered into her garden over the better part of a decade — Skinny Tail, Fat Tail, Pretty, and eventually "Old Boy," who held her gaze for a long moment before disappearing under the fence for the last time. But underneath that gentleness is something I find genuinely instructive about how to love something wild: never coaxing him closer, never trying to touch him, simply being present and letting trust arrive on his terms. It is a small essay about boundaries and devotion, and it left me thinking about how rare that kind of patient, undemanding love has become.
This issue does not flinch from grief. Daniel de Culla's two poems — one an unsparing lament that imagines dogs sniffing through the rubble of Gaza for the children they once knew, the other a sharper-edged political satire — are difficult reading, and I want to be honest with you about that rather than soften it. Daniel writes from a place of real anguish about the war, and his poetry takes a clear, partisan position on who is responsible for it — a position not every reader will share, and one this magazine doesn't endorse simply by publishing it. What I will say is that DoubleSpeak has always been a place for poets to say the unbearable thing in their own voice, even — especially — when it makes us uncomfortable, because the alternative is a magazine where only the safe griefs get to be spoken.
Ankit Singh's photo essay, Playtime Is Over: Play, Power, and the Loss of Innocence, approaches a different kind of violence altogether — not the violence of war but the slow, loving, almost invisible violence of how a child is taught, gesture by gesture, toy by toy, to hold a gun before she understands what holding one means. Staged against Michelangelo, Titian and Fra Angelico, it is one of the most ambitious and unsettling photo-essays we have ever published, and Ankit's closing line stayed with me for days: the loss of innocence "lands not in the moment it was taken, but in the moment she stopped missing it." Alongside it, Ananya Agrawal's quieter photoessay on the pause between transactions, Sreedeep Bhattacharya's borrowed light above the treeline, and the photo-stories from Devansh Sisodia, Girish Rajendran and Mihir Muthanna KC each, in their own register, ask us to look a little longer at things we usually rush past.
I want to draw your attention especially to Viviana De Cecco's translation of Arturo Graf's Nell'ombra ("In the Shadow"), a forest poem written in 1901 by an Italian Scapigliatura poet most English readers will never have encountered otherwise. Viviana also gave us an original image-story this month, Seed of Life. There is something quite moving about a single contributor working simultaneously as translator and original artist in the same issue — carrying someone else's century-old longing across a language barrier, and then turning around to make her own.
Hasan Nashid's essay on digital addiction among Bangladesh's youth, and Renz Chester R. Gumaru's essay imagining the future life of Generation Alpha and Beta, both look squarely at what unregulated technology is doing to the young — not with alarmism, but with the patient, evidence-minded tone of people who actually want solutions rather than headlines. They sit, fittingly, alongside Vandana Kumar's poem on "artificial benediction" — three very different writers circling the same unease about what we are handing our children through a screen.
And then, the fiction — so much of it this month that I read late into several nights. Mehreen Ahmed, Eva Petropoulou Lianou, Nahar Trina (twice over), Rathin Bhattacharjee, Declan Geraghty, Shaik Asad, Surya Narayan V, Noah Reese-Clauson, Julian Gallo, Steve Saulsbury, Alexander Gifford, Pavya J.S., Austin Bustad, Houdi McCabe, Rubi Vasani and Nick Garlick each sent us a story this June, and reading them back to back is like flipping through a kaleidoscope of human concern — betrayal, war, tea gone cold, clouds without edges, a love simply called "Us."
I have to single out Issy Jinarmo's collaborative short story, The Bank. Issy, readers may not know, is the shared pen name of three writers — Jill Baggett, Narelle Noppert and Maureen Kelly OAM — who live scattered across Australia and began writing stories together by email during lockdown, simply to stay connected. Their story this month, about a hapless bank robber who falls into a pet shop aquarium, wrestles a water snake, and ends up recruiting two escaped monkeys as accomplices, is sheer, unrepentant fun — and a reminder that collaboration doesn't always have to be solemn to be meaningful. Three women, an ocean of distance between some of their kitchens, still finishing each other's sentences years later. That is its own quiet argument for everything this magazine believes in.
To every single contributor named here, and to the many more whose work I haven't had room to describe in full — thank you. Thank you for trusting a small, free, independent magazine with the stories you could have kept private. Thank you for writing honestly about your fathers, your foxes, your wars, your daughters, your made-up nights in Soho pubs. None of this exists without you choosing, again and again, to send your most unguarded selves to a stranger's inbox and hope.
And to you, dear reader — thank you for still believing that a magazine that asks nothing of you but your attention is worth opening every month. In a world organised increasingly around what divides us, this issue is, once again, proof of the opposite: that empathy outlives the fighting, that love persists past the hate, and that the page remains one of the last places where none of that requires anyone's permission.
With gratitude and humility,
Arpan
Editor, DoubleSpeak Magazine
DoubleSpeak 