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Traversals or Some of Us All Over All at Once: A Folio on Walking

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/thr.2023.a903934

1939-9774

Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

Traversals or Some of Us All Over All at Once: A Folio on Walking Anna Maria Hong, Guest Editor (bio) and Christine Hume, Guest Editor (bio) guest editors In a society predicated on a militarized spectacle of privacy and safety, what does it mean to take a walk? Writers and artists have long engaged the walk as a conceptual and generative practice, a spur to thinking and creativity, a way of immersing in nature or the crowd, surfing urban serendipities, a place to awaken the senses and incubate private reveries. As we shift through minute perceptions of body and place, our walking propels us into intellectual percolations and kinetic receptivity. Walking establishes an alternating rhythm, shuttling us between inner and outer worlds, and for many writers, the walk is a recursive loop from draft to walk to draft. However, the tradition of the literary walk as meditative inquiry has also mostly been practiced by cisgender men and straight, white writers without disabilities, who are most able to enjoy walking in public without fear, psychic danger, and physical risk. As practitioners and teachers of writings on walking, we wanted to reinvigorate walk literature as a forum not only for mental meandering but also as a form for talking about how we move through locales, rural and urban, while navigating the extremities of the 21st century, particularly as women, BIPOC writers, queer writers, writers with disabilities, and trans and nonbinary writers, contending with the likelihood of harm and hostility, while enacting walking’s pleasures and reclaiming public space. The antagonist’s goal is to make you think of him when he’s not there, to invade your sense of equilibrium and undermine feelings of safety, the right to exist, move, and express oneself in all one’s splendor and mess where one lives and travels. Terror flattens the internal landscape, so that we’re all afraid of the same thing, a pervasive, inescapable threat. A folio is not a legislative space; we can’t enact laws to end the persecution of pedestrians without racial, gender, and economic privilege, but we can work on the inner world by making a space in which some of the heterogeneity of our experiences is narrated and considered, a place where one can read about the paths of others, their perceptions, motives for walking, daydreams, traumas, irritations, surprises, puzzlements, regrets, and delights under everyday and extraordinary circumstances. This collection may give you, as it has us, an expanded sense of what else is in there when you’re out there, walking alone or accompanied. [End Page 97] Is a walk a dance? A cosmic journey? A beauty hunt? A stabilizer? A path to/from (the) work? A memorial? A crime? A clearing? A rut? A gauntlet? A thread? A badge of faith? A rant? A necessity? A reclamation of inheritance denied? A self-hypnosis? A sexy saunter? A sweaty trek amid cars and ghosts? A lifelong conversation? A recounting? A refusal? A flame? A flan? A walk is always past, present, and future, taking place over multiple temporalities, historical strata, and conceptual terrains. This brief gathering encompasses writings on walks from Lagos to Paris, Siberia to Omaha, Los Angeles to rural Virginia, from Fire Island to the fire of the mind, the range of these writings underscoring the capacity of each writer to ignite new models of belonging and transience as they go. Some pieces retrace writings that paved the way, reimagining where else they might lead us. To walk takes effort, intention. In what follows, we amble through weathered narrations and stride into unknown territory, where wandering may become trailblazing, where setting out is a means of liberation and finding one’s way. Will you walk with us? [End Page 98] Anna Maria Hong anna maria hong is the author of Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award; the novella H & G, winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize; and Fablesque, winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. Her poetry, fiction, and essays appear in publications including The Nation, The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Guernica, Conduit, Notre Dame Review...