Yesterday we started writing, and I wrote: What fun to receive your letter! I would very much like to be pen pals with someone like you.

Where are you from? they wrote.

I live on an island formed entirely of ice. Imagine a place very north, and very cold, and imagine you’ve sliced a hole through the heavens and reached up and swept aside the stars. The darkness spills down about you and fills your empty spaces of uprooted plants, your lost family and faraway friends. It pours in, and the temperature drops and the ice grows. It’s a sad story, but it has an end.

And what do you do? they asked.

Today I deliver a bundle of sixteens: it’s our sixteenth issue, with sixteen writers. You can call it our sweet sixteen, but that’s a number made for sunny days, and we’re in the northern hemisphere, skirting the edge of winter. This issue arrives on the eve of change, and it deserves a celebration – here’s to the sixteen years I spent on the island, and to winter, and darkness, and endurance.

Enough about me. Where are you from, and what do you do? And more importantly, where are you going?