About the Ritual, Healing, and World-Making Issue

Welcome to the Spring 2026 issue of Rejoinder. This issue’s theme is “Ritual, Healing, and World-Making.” In a world increasingly marked, or marred, by brutality and rupture, our call for submissions posed a set of questions about survival in challenging times. We sought insight about ways to harness agency and creativity in the face of persistent turmoil. We wanted to know how people find joy amidst brokenness and heal despite systems structured to harm. We asked about restorative rituals and practices that could speak to our souls. And we sought to discover how people mark transitions, generate transformational visions, and model alternate ways of being.

     The contributors to this issue of Rejoinder explore these questions in provocative ways. We meet a feminist who digs a hole in a national park, plants themselves in the dirt, films the seven-hour immersive and then, decades later, reflects on the experience (Morgenstern). We meet a mythological Irish goddess, long petrified into rock, standing vigil beside the ocean, silently guarding women’s stories. When two men deploy new technology to steal these stories, the goddess resists, and we watch the ensuing drama (Fahey).

     We read verses about medicinal herbs (Valois), incantations against ICE (Giragosian), encounter a coven of migrant bruhas (witches) weaving webs in an artistic coven (Escalona De Abreu and Marchetti), and observe a transmutation ritual that involves somatic bodywork, hot wax, and improvised dance (Ferraro).

     We learn about sacred Yoruba rituals and the wonder of serendipitous healing encounters in Nigeria (Villaroel Lamoza) and about the revival of dreamfishing and dreamshining, two healing creole-indigenous epistemological practices used by the Kristang People from Southeast Asia (Martens Wong Zhi Qiang). We travel to the West Bank, where we witness Palestinian trauma at the hands of Israeli settlers and contemplate the meaning of worlding and unworlding through the prism of an ancient, sacred cave that, for Jewish mystics, is a portal between worlds (Mayer).

     “We who are living are the bridge between the past and all possible futures,” writes artist LaShawnda Crowe Storm, whose cast-metal sculptures are among the featured artworks in this issue. “We are the space where healing can transform what comes after.” Scott Ennis describes the process of healing after a traumatic brain injury and the rituals of survival that mark day-to-day life in a changed future where, without maps for guidance, world-making must be improvised in ways that “allow life to continue inside conditions that resist narrative coherence.” Like Ennis, Angela Adee Andriesse, whose autobiographical cartoon chronicles the effects of receiving a late autism diagnosis, asserts that “healing … is not a tidy redemption narrative. It’s practice.” For Andriesse, healing involves shedding the “mask” she adopted for self-protection to discover “what it means to live without disappearing.”

     In her poem “The Long of it and the Steady,” Charlene Langfur underscores the importance of patience as she tries to survive “in a world of climate change in which I am getting older, / on a planet increasingly oriented to the young.” We see her small, careful rituals—reading in the garden, walking her dog, planting seeds—gentle ways to keep faith and cultivate the earth. In many ways, her practice reflects the ethos of Laura McCullogh’s poem “Liturgy of Attention.” What we own is limited, McCullough suggests, as is our comprehension – but we do know “attention /as liturgy, sacrament, /a poetics of prayer.” Thus, we should strive to practice attentiveness and heed the recurrent imperative “needs more care.” This is also a message that resonates with Kristen T. Woodward’s portrayal of sentinel species, animals that provide a warning that something is amiss in this world. Woodward’s encaustic paintings, which depict biodiversity and relationships between species, are featured on the cover of this issue as well as within it.

We hope you enjoy this issue of Rejoinder. We particularly thank Sarah Butler for her help with this issue. Please subscribe to Rejoinder to receive future issues and join our email list to learn more about IRW.

     Sarah Tobias
     Editor