MISSION
STATEMENT
In
the Beginning
(Inaugural
editorial, Summer 2001) Or go to KINGSVIEW & CO the updated extension of DreamSeeker Magazine
Words,
words, and more words. Creeks and rivers of words
spilling from countless books and magazines and
the endless Internet, flooding into that rising
ocean of words that threaten to drown us all. Now
even more words from DreamSeeker Magazine.
Why add to the deluge?
Because always we lovers of words
sense somewhere still echoing in us those verses
of Genesis which tell us that, confronted with
the void, God spoke the words that set creation
in motion. Then God told us to continue creation
by naming what God had spoken into being.
So we do. No matter how many words
spew forth, uselessly enough more often than not,
still we ache to find some part of the void until
now untouched by human words and from it help
call into being yet more new worlds.
This is not to imply the words in DSM
are better than those elsewhere. Rather, the hope
is simply that even amid the risk of too many
words, always there is fresh dreaming to be done.
As DSM editor, I’ll be
guided by the conviction that amid the many
Anabaptist magazines already publishing fine
visions, there is room for another dedicated to
publishing “voices from the soul,”
meaning writers aching to share passionate and
personal dreams of how the void has been or could
be shaped into a new creation.
Commenting in The New York Times
Book Review (Jan. 7, 2001, p. 35) on
“The Big Chill” in writing, Roxana
Robinson contends that whereas a century ago
books throbbed with emotion, now “passion is
largely absent from our books: an icy chill has
crept across the writer’s landscape.”
She hopes that “in the new century
we’ll rediscover passion”; I
agree—and hope DSM can be part of
the quest.
DSM writing level will
range from homespun simplicity through whatever
depths a writer wants to explore without limiting
audience to specialists. As can be seen in this
first issue, style will include straightforward
exposition yet with a tendency toward lyricism.
I’ll aim as editor to give DSM
readers a reliable source of well-edited
writing rooted in core Anabaptist or
faith-related passions. I’ll offer writers
considerable latitude to decide for themselves
what topics they must dream their way through and
in what style to be true to their unique
callings.
I’ll also work to keep DSM
from drifting only toward the leftwing radicalism
some see as the inevitable result of seeking new
dreams. Surely there is as much fresh speaking to
be done by those whose bent is conservative and
who dream their way across the unexplored
terrains of the traditional.
Roxana Robinson urges us to consider
the possibility that even in—maybe
especially in—a new millennium, “love
still drives us; we still need it as the moving
force in what we read.” Let the
dreamseeking, heartfelt and passionate and filled
with love, begin.
—Michael A. King
|