Winter 2023

In this issue, reporter Harriet Brown and photographer Lynn Johnson offer a deep dive into the impact of medicinal cannabis on children who suffer from severe illness. Faced with little to no options, in an often-hostile legal landscape, parents have turned to cannabis oil as a way to accelerate their children’s healing or offset the potent side effects of intense pharmacological regimens—often at great legal risk. The story represents years of reporting and intimate access to provide an unflinching look at these families’ experiences. The Winter issue also includes Laura Kasinof’s reporting from the remote Yemeni island of Socotra, where people find themselves at a crossroads between preserving the island’s unique ecological integrity and desperately needed development provided (with strings attached) by Arab and European speculators.

This issue also features a pair of unique essays: Boyce Upholt on one artist’s response to the Great Silence of our galaxy; and Sarah Fuss Kessler on her experience leaving a cult, and how it led to a reexamination of the cult defector’s narrative.

The fiction is dedicated entirely to Saskia Vogel’s standout translation of Linnea Axelsson’s Swedish family saga, told across layers of a mother’s memories. Garret Keizer reflects on the underestimated sublimity of gratitude, and Laura Kolbe takes a fresh look at artist Edvard Munch’s landscapes. Andrew Zubiri brings us a #VQRTrueStory on Abaca from the Philippines; Anuj Shrestha contributes an especially poignant Open Letter; and Jim Coan wraps up his run as the Drawing It Out guest columnist with the final installment of “Our Social Baseline.” Poetry from Daniel Halpern & Robert Hass, Austin Segrest, and the late Andrea Werblin Reid round out the issue.