We were surprised to hear from an old airline acquaintance that because our frequent flier account had remained dormant for twenty-three months, our miles will soon become invalid, and expire.

Our miles?

All your miles will now irretrievably expire, they said.

Not a problem, we told them – we prefer kilometers. (Sometimes we even use kilometres.) Still, the email had an ominous ring to it, and we felt shaken at the prospect of losing any of our past trodden or future steps. The whole letter sounded more like a poem written by a Bond villain than an advertisement:

It is not possible
to save older miles
from expiring.

They followed this with an offer to extend the validity of our miles (a brief trip to the fountain of youth, perhaps), unaware that we already have a system in place to catalog and indefinitely extend the validity of all our miles, past, present and future. We call it The Literary Bohemian.

This brings us to the matter at hand: it’s summer here in the northern hemisphere, and high time for a stormy new issue. Read on and experience rolling thunder, continuous cloud to ground lightning, hailstone the size of hen’s eggs, and brilliant rays that pierce your cumulonimbus. This is Issue 18, another big one, with nineteen authors – three of them old friends, and sixteen brand new Bohemians. In this issue, as always, we promise that these miles will not expire.