Special thanks:
Kayla Sosa, Editor-in-Chief
Saira Liaqat, Backend Developer
Shawn Grady, Benefactor
all Anthology I writers, poets, and visual artists…
Thank you, everyone.

a note from the founder…

Dear Readers,

Strangers & Karma’s Anthology I represents a piece of Now, the small and ever-evolving part of the universal puzzle that forms the perceptions that affect our individual realities.

We often subconsciously move through the lens of our environments, places that shape us, drive our reactions and ultimately meet us at the precipice of enlightenment. Anthology I reflects such drivers of the human condition, in a way that encourages us to recognize what isn’t being said.

For example, the featured illustration above is an untitled figure drawing that has been sitting in a young artist’s sketchbook for years. Likely considered unimportant at the time, it features a guy wearing a surgical mask as sunglasses. Nothing more, nothing less. But what makes this sketch important to us, what gives its simplicity significance is not knowing what has transpired in the life of the subject since the sketch was drawn. While the surgical mask represents a crisis of the past, it also connects the figure to a crisis of the present, completely through the artist, Iryna Komashchuk.

The info I had at the time was…
• Iryna is based in Kyiv;
• she drew it in 2021 during the pandemic,
• a few months before the start of Ukraine’s latest conflict—an event dubbed 24.

Knowing so little about the actual drawing, other than who drew it and when it was drawn, I felt its message translate into deep curiosity. My imagination begged to know where the drawing’s subject had gone since that moment of silly innovation, during a time when stepping out of lonely shadows meant celebrating what freedoms remained, to sit unafraid in the company of others. The sketch encouraged me to recall headlines, images and war footage burned into memory. My brain began to calculate and connect the known to the unknown of the sketch, form a story, imagine its arc. It made me question what the figure has witnessed since 24, if he is safe, if he has daughters, how his life has changed, what he feels.

So, find a quiet space to savor each piece of Anthology I as a testament to our own realities, how it relates to current events, how we as humans perceive that which is seemingly anodyne or apparently scandalous, and consider how these perceptions may suddenly shift and evolve over time.

Thank you,

Blaire Grady
Founder, Strangers & Karma