Current Issue

This issue of VQR turns its attention to a community that public systems have quietly neglected. In a portfolio of unwavering intimacy, photographer Lynn Johnson and writer Amy S. F. Lutz follow the Siegman, Pirozzi, and Cullen families, whose profoundly autistic children require a lifetime of constant care. Their reporting reveals a population caught between two increasingly outspoken political ideologies, neither of which has solved the problem of who will care for these children, and how, once their parents no longer can.

Meanwhile, the issue’s essays explore the small rituals we adopt to make an unruly world more manageable. Meghan Flaherty finds in Dungeons & Dragons an unlikely outlet for her feral son, and through it a path to reconnection. Garret Keizer spends his Sundays collecting beer cans on the side of the road and discovers, in that lowly ceremony, a metaphor for grace and humility. Philip Kennicott revisits a solitary trek through the New Zealand wilderness with a paperback copy of Ibsen, finding far greater darkness in the playwright’s diction than in anything the forest had to offer.

Stephen Kearse, Reig Larsen, and Owen Park contribute fiction. The issue also includes poetry by Jill Bialosky, Ranudi Gunawardena, Troy Osaki, and Dalia Taha (translated by Sara Elkamel).

Cover illustration by Laura Weiler.