Inertia, as a physical force, seems capable of exerting influence over the events of our lives as well as movements (or lack thereof). Once set on a path, we tend to continue toward an inevitable end, each step of a progression as typical as the last. It is the path of least resistance. Anything else would require a choice, an action, and everything would change. The life that I’ve led until now would come to an end.

This month, we take a look at endings. In Sentenced, Buffy Charlet takes a look at the sweeping changes occurring in state marijuana laws from the inside as she works at a medical marijuana farm. Jillian York departs from Morocco in Leaving Meknes. Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt reflects on the most devastating of endings in her series of poems titled Alexis, stone walls, and butterflies. In Airborne anxiety, Ellen G. Wernecke reviews two different books about air voyages with very different motivations and very different endings.

And so here we are. Inertia moving us along in the same channel, through the same endless routines, and grinding away our lives a second or a year at a time. We can persist. This much is clear. The question is, do we want to? Isn’t it time to put an end to these patterns that bring us nowhere?

Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

When you move into a 98-year-old house, it is the house that owns you and not the other way around. No matter how attentive or inattentive the previous owners may have been, after most of a century, gravity has had a long time to do its worst, and even the best-kept homes will start to sag at the corners after nine decades. Since moving into the aforementioned house three months ago, I’ve learned that no project is as simple as it seems it should be.

Of course, there are few things that come easily that are worth having. I was 19 before I discovered the uncomplicated joy that hard work can bring, and with each task, I am thankful that I not only have the work to keep myself busy, but the good fortune to have a home to live in and a job to work at. There, but for the grace of God, go I, I think as I watch the "human interest" stories on the news of job loss, foreclosure, and the pain of a struggling economy. I do my best to remain thankful and to take nothing for granted.

This month’s issue of InTheFray features a piece from Suzanne Farrell, titled Spotlighting the neighborhood, about the effect of the recent U.N. General Assembly on ordinary New Yorkers. Shelley Horner shares her opinions of Elsie Sze’s new novel in her review Chick lit, Bhutan style. We will once again feature the exquisite poetry of Rae Pater in her collection Circles of memory. We also have an impressionistic, behind-the-scenes look at a recording session in the short video The marina is too shallow.

As is in keeping with the season, we at InTheFray are thankful for our wonderful contributors and our wonderful readers. It is you who make this site what it is, and we humbly thank you.

Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

I repeat the words carefully, trying to match the timing and intonation of a cathedral full of people who clearly know the routine, have said these words before, and could probably recite them in their sleep. I am the stranger, I am the interloper, the lapsed Protestant in a Catholic church, trying to mimic the rituals well enough to blend into the background. The rituals are familiar, yet different. The prayers are similar, but they leave off the endings, and I continue alone, speaking into the reflective silence that sits over the congregants. I am feeling out of sync, out of place, and alone.

It strikes me that we are all ultimately alone in our lives. It is not an original thought, nor is this the first time I’ve had it. We can never know what goes on in another’s mind, and we can never fully share any experience, not completely. We can rely on others to buoy our spirits, but it is always up to us to make of our own lives what we will. Happiness is an internal factor, not external. Growth is always from within.

This month’s issue begins with Elsie Sze’s piece Belgrade: city of monuments, which explores a few of the Serbian city’s monuments from an outsider’s perspective. Jaya Padmanabhan explores the intersection of art and intellect in Idol nerd. Kate Hassett shows us a summer passing in a few moments in Shoots and leaves, and Patricia Hawkenson shares a few summer reflections in her collection of poems titled Hooks, knives, and slivers of smoke. Finally, Sarah Seltzer takes a look at two books about Pat Tillman in her review One soldier, many stories.

While we will all face death alone, and while all of our triumphs and despairs along the way will be uniquely ours and ours alone, it would be foolish to then stipulate that there is no need for others. Joy might be a flame that burns from within, but others may be the catalyst, the spark that ignites the blaze of happiness. However weak we may be as individuals, together we will always be strong.

Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

Try to remember your earliest memory. The further back I think, the more fragmented and shattered my memories become. Sometimes, they’re memories that have been cultivated by my family, and I suspect their careful tending to each early image in my mind has shaped the events, changed it to match our shared stories more closely than the actual events that occurred. Human memory is strange like that: What seems real may be based more firmly in fantasy than anything else. The earth’s memory, however, is much more reliable.

As those of us in the northern hemisphere ease into autumn, the earth begins a familiar routine. Loons, hatched this spring, race across the surface of great northern lakes and take flight, heading to Florida for the winter without being told that the cold weather is about to come. Their instinct is their memory, and they need not be told. Wild rice ripens and falls, in a more bountiful version of the leaves of maples, oaks, birches, the trees of Frost and Thoreau. All around us are signs that the summer is ending, yet in this ending is a glorious, shining beginning: the start of fall, the season of the harvest, the reaping of the seeds that have been coming to fruit all summer.

This month, InTheFray explores stories of beginnings. In Floating through space and time , Francis Estrada looks at Filipino culture in the United States and various representations thereof. During Ramadan, the end of the day signifies the beginning of a meal for Muslims. Kyle Boelte tells the story of a family from Darfur living in Maine in his piece Ramadan dinner. David Xia explores the connections between endings and beginnings and his only family history in Un/certain trajectories. Finally, Ellen G. Wernecke reviews The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream.

We hope that you enjoy the change of the season and this time of beginnings and endings. Thanks for reading InTheFray!

Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

There lies within me, and, I suspect, within many people, a strong sense of fairness, coupled with a powerful desire for justice. I want the car that goes speeding around me on the highway to be pulled over; I want the thief to be caught; I want the U.S. health care system to treat the rich and the poor equally well; and I want the bad guy to lose. One of the more difficult lessons I learned in my childhood was that sometimes, maybe even often, this doesn’t happen. To paraphrase a cliché, all too often, nice people finish last. Some people learn this early, and learn to let such petty injustices slide, and some internalize such unfairness and burn with it from within.

In this month’s issue, we look at a few such injustices. In Left behind, Stephen Maughan explores the fate of orphans in Romania. Sarah Seltzer reviews Shanghai Girls, in which two sisters face the injustice of war to escape World War II China and eventually end up in San Francisco.

This month’s issue also features a collection of three videos from Belinda Subraman, titled Gardenia petals and ugly art dolls. Finally, Through the Looking Glass editor Naomi Ishiguro shares a few of her experiences in Japan in her piece Haru/Natsu (spring/summer).

Fairness and justice are one of the earliest abstract ideas young children grasp, and were once considered uniquely human concepts. Recent studies have shown that dogs, monkeys, and other animals also understand what is fair and what isn’t. It would seem, then, that the universe has a sense of fairness. It is a shame that it is so often violated, but it is also something we must all learn to accept.

Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

Do you use something powerful and dangerous, like drugs or firearms? Or do you prefer something a bit more mundane, like television or food? Perhaps you prefer the sweet bliss of a good novel or a fine sonnet, or maybe you’re a runner or a biker. Maybe it’s the pure joy of a melody, or the sublime ecstasy of harmony. Or maybe, for you, it’s simply the sweet freedom of sleep, the ultimate escape.

Whatever your mechanism of choice, the need for escape is essential to the human experience. In fact, during traumatic events such as war or abuse, your brain will dissociate from your body, escaping with your consciousness while the rest of you suffers. It is how our body protects our mind from the most extreme circumstances.

In this month’s issue, we explore the different techniques people employ to escape, and what they wish to escape from. Our journey starts with Matthew Kongo, a Sudanese refugee who is building a new life in Maine. Kyle Boelte tells Kongo’s story in To a home unknown. Next, Alexis Wolff tells us how her work in a treatment center for adolescent girls helped her escape a bit of her own past in Youth behind walls. In A soul with nothing up its sleeves, poet Larry Jaffe escapes his body and shares his venture with us.

America’s meth addiction is a problem that is rooted in the escapism of a large swath of the rural parts of the country. In Matthew Heller’s review of Nick Reding’s book Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, he explores Reding’s chronicle of how one town in Iowa is trying to fight back against the drug. In Nature’s waltz, artist Maureen Shaughnessy shares with us a selection of digital collages. Finally, Rachael Jackson gets off the beaten path in Costa Rica, in her story Hidden Costa Rica.

So, what about you? What do you need to escape from? How do you get away? Tell us your story below, in our comments section.

Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

In any economic crisis, it is always the poorest that feel the effects the earliest, suffer the most, and begin to recover last. It is also true that in any economic crisis, it is always those who make the most noise who receive the most aid. The voices of those in abject poverty have long ago been silenced, and so it follows that the United States government hands hundreds of billions of dollars to bankers and other wealthy men, while food shelf stocks shrink, unemployment aid is exhausted, and welfare recipients are denigrated as deadbeats regularly on national television and radio networks.

I was in rural Nepal when a schoolteacher asked me, "Is it true that there is no poverty in America?" As he explained to me how he and the majority of his countrymen lived on less than $1,500 per year, how many lived on far less than that, how could I explain that poverty does exist in the United States? "But you are so rich," he said. "How can there be anyone who is poor in America?" Yet poverty exists. It is as grinding, as crushing, and as punishing in the United States as anywhere else in the world. Today, in the midst of this economic turbulence, tent cities are popping up just down the road from the McMansions. The voice of the poor may be a quiet one, but it is growing in numbers.

In this issue, we share stories of these difficult times. Gregory Wilson provides the historical context of government involvement in economic development in his piece Bailout. Iceland’s financial crisis has been far more severe than much of the rest of the world, and newly-elected MP Birgitta Jonsdottir shares a mini-documentary called Icelandic financial crisis, about how and why everything fell apart. In Day laborers, Gayathri Vaidyanathan looks at how the crisis has affected undocumented immigrant workers in New York, and in ”Where’s my bailout?”, Dean Stattmann shows us how the crisis has affected graffiti in SoHo. In Mexico, where a war rages over the trafficking of drugs, violence is increasing. Patrick Corcoran documents the challenges of reporting on the violence without getting killed in Reports of violence.

The economic crisis, of course, has inspired some to greater things. In Today, finance and trade bailouts are too often in the headlines, Terry Lowenstein shares two poems drawn from the headlines. Others, such as Nathan Bahls, view the crisis as an opportunity to take a risk. He shares the details in Six short hours.

It may be a few brief months, or it may be a few long years, but eventually, like all things, this crisis, too, will pass. The question is, when it does, will we go back to our old, profligate ways, or will we learn a lasting lesson. Will we remember what it is like to be without, and share what we can with the women and men around us who are still struggling? Or will we turn our backs, return to the table, and continue to gorge ourselves on the excesses of a civilization?

Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

Human infants are uniquely fragile at birth. Many animals, such as deer, horses, cattle, and elephants, are able to stand and walk within hours of their birth. Other animals, like dogs, cats, and bears, are born naked and blind, but grow quickly and reach maturity in a year or two. Because humans have such an extended childhood, the bonds between parents and children are far more developed and far more important than in most animals.

In this issue, we feature stories that explore this bond. We begin with Venkat Srinivasan’s look at undocumented African immigrants and the sacrifices these parents make for their children in Skilled undocumented workers in New York City. Bob Lee shares his reflections on fatherhood in the wake of the birth of his second child in Fatherhood = salvation. We also get a look at the life of a mother and son who live on the streets of Hanoi, Vietnam with Ehrin Macksey’s visual essay Simple happiness.

In Travels with Pa, Nancy Antonietti takes us with her as she accompanies her maternal grandfather back to Sicily for the first time since he left at 16. Colin Wilcox shares three poems in his collection Landscapes. Finally, Emma Kat Richardson brings us to China with her review of Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven.

Of course, as with all things, there are exceptions to the rule of the nurturing parent. For every story of sacrifice, there is another story of abuse and neglect. Some children find the world to be a frightening, abusive place, and their mothers and fathers to be the source of many of these problems. Because their first relationship, their attachment to their parents, is so dysfunctional, every subsequent relationship they form is often also dysfunctional. In this way, abuse and neglect become a recurring issue and are passed down from generation to generation. It is a reminder of just how important the bonds between a parent and child really are.

Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.