Spiral Orb Ten:
Collaborative Curation: Stone/Scale/Shift
This is the second in a series of collaboratively curated issues. For the first, Spiral Orb Seven, I invited a group of writers whose work I admired to contribute to the issue, and I asked each of them to invite another writer as a contributor. For the current issue, I asked each of the contributors to Spiral Orb Seven to choose one of the writers who would be published in Spiral Orb Ten.
The curators of this issue are: Don Mee Choi : Donovan Colleps : Manuel Fihman : Hugo García Manríquez : Yona Harvey : Jen Hofer : Douglas Kearney : G.E. Patterson : Craig Santos Perez : John Pluecker : Cristina Rivera Garza : Jennifer Tseng : Sara Uribe : Maged Zaher. My thanks go out to all of them.
One of the poems published in Spiral Orb Seven, by Manuel Fihman, was titled "Juego en evolución/Evolving game." Fihman's beautiful concept of the evolving game informs my sense of Spiral Orb Ten. It grows or evolves from Spiral Orb Seven, and it stands on its own.
The theme of Spiral Orb Ten is "Stone/Scale/Shift." Some of the contributors expressed this theme by including one or more of the words stone, scale, or shift in their work. Others did so through thematic alignment with one or more of the words. I picked stone, scale, and shift without a fixed idea of what they would mean or be. The writers of Spiral Orb Ten have taught me a great deal about them.
Thank you for reading this issue of Spiral Orb.
—Wendy Burk, Guest Editor, Spiral Orb Ten