EDITORIAL: In the Beginning

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 also 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.

And I’ll 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