For this editor’s note, I am handing it off to multi-hyphenate artist, WRJ contributor, and perpetual source of inspiration Nicole Bethune Winters. In addition to sharing some of her photography for this issue, Nicole can be found in Issue 8 and podcast episode 9 (audio/video). Without further ado, let’s begin.

Aaron Lelito, Editor in Chief

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So much of art is, as Joe Dahut says, “calling out; searching for my pulse.” A compulsion, if you will, to pull the extraordinary out of the mundane, to find the romantic details in the simplest ones, to extract new ways of perceiving and experiencing the world. In “How to Be Less Earth & More Sky,” Jodi Balas writes, “My bones are still learning / how to defrost & not shatter,” and what is art if not that?

This issue is full of vulnerable moments — with what Katie Pack calls “so many openings, so many closings, so many hand-holdings.” With “silence you could shatter.” The kind of moments that suck you into them. That make you nod your head. That make your eyes sting. That tug at the corners of your mouth. That make you feel something.

When Kelly Gray reminds us that “the nettle rises swiftly with each spring” I feel the sting of it on my skin. The itch. The rash of predictability, and the possibility of flowering despite it. When Glenda Goodrich asks, “Was my wildness dead, too?” I ache to tilt my head back and howl, to sprint into the New Mexico desert and roll in the dust. To feel the scrape of my skin on barbed wire as I barrel through the wall between safety and survival.

Regardless of its form, art is the baring of the soul; it is stripping down and walking into sharp light so that someone else might feel just a little bit less alone. And since its first issue, Wild Roof has cultivated a vital space where art can breathe — a space that celebrates experimentation, introspection, and connection.

I hope you find a little bit of yourself in these pages. In the moments of joy, in the crises, in the hurt. That there is at least one line, one photograph, or one brushstroke that tethers you, that pulls at a memory, at a feeling. At least one moment that makes you pause, that raises the hair on your skin, that sticks to your throat — at least one moment that connects you to the artist behind it.

Nicole Bethune Winters