Sweet did not begin in one place. We began in Columbus, Ohio and Upstate New York and Tampa Bay. Those early conversations among our founding editors occurred in cars and in living rooms and over meals in diners, via text messages and late night phone calls, in long, winding emails. We manned our booth at book fairs in D.C. and L.A., and Vancouver and Chicago, NYC and Hudson. Like our readers, our writers have come from all over: our local literary circles and neighborhoods, across the Americas, and in Australia, Europe and the U.K., Singapore—spanning continents, crossing great oceans, connecting from afar.
This issue marks ten years of Sweet, and we’re celebrating the occasion by featuring the winner and runners-up of our inaugural flash nonfiction contest. The winner, Lisa Laughlin’s Kindling, elegantly meditates on the meaning of home and its inevitable connection to loss, and I can’t help but consider how that connection exists for this publication and the family we’ve formed within it.
Sweet exists without a literal home. We have a mailing address and a web address, but the magazine—like its nomadic founding editors—has always defied permanent, physical location. No spine binds its pages. No building houses its contents. And yet it contains a threshold we cross daily, a hearth we warm to, a table upon which we break bread. It has become a stable presence, one forged despite cross-country moves and hurricane evacuations and the ticking away of our own inevitable losses.
Thank you for sitting down with us these ten years, for finding—as we have—a place of warmth, family, and sustenance: a home.
– K.C. Wolfe, Founding Editor
