Rolling Home Chronicles
Delayed Publication Notice — This issue, originally prepared for Autumn 1974, has been delayed due to a misunderstanding with time. Subscribers who have moved since then may inquire at the Post Office, which has also moved.
A Note from the Road
We are here because the world is vast and the ride is good. Not easy — good. The kind of good that includes flat tires, sudden downpours, and the kindness of strangers who have no reason to be kind. We are here to pay attention. To notice what everyone else is driving past too fast to see.
This magazine is a journal of the journey. We write fiction that tells the truth and non-fiction that admits it is making things up as it goes along. We braid voices, collide forms, let a math proof and a blues riff sit at the same table. We believe in the absurd because the absurd is honest — it is what you reach for when the standard shapes do not fit what you are trying to say.
We are interested in the complicated hope. The hope that knows the fire is real and writes anyway. The hope that builds a boat while laughing at the size of the ocean. The hope that keeps rolling not because home is a destination but because rolling is the conversation.
Every subscriber is a correspondent. Every reader is an editor. Every story is a dispatch from a self that did not exist before the telling. Send us yours. We are listening from wherever we are.
The sky is not ending. It is opening. Keep moving. You are already home.
— The Editors, from wherever they are
Ev'rybody's building the big ships and the boats
Some are building monuments
Others, jotting down notes
Ev'rybody's in despair
Ev'ry girl and boy
But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here
Ev'rybody's gonna jump for joy
Come all without, come all within
You'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn
— an unknown fiddler who left for the road
Time passes slowly up here in the mountains
We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains
Catch the wild fishes that float through the stream
Time passes slowly when you're lost in a dream
— just another fiddler
The Tinder Box · A Column · On Writing Hope
The Art of Hopeful Absurdity
By KW Norton · Composed to the modern classical renaissance
How does one write hopeful, compassionate, richly human fiction which touches on the absurd and murders metaphors and leaps tall buildings at a single bound? The polar opposite of the kind of absurdist fiction which contemplates suicide or waking up as a cockroach? At least for this writer it is by giving my characters plenty of rope to hang themselves but finding a way to enjoy their escapades as they endeavor to do so.
As I write I listen to complex music, often that belonging to the modern classical renaissance. Because we live in incommensurate and mythologically potent times, I find the leap into a certain latitude of fictional exploration, merging genres without apology, to be freeing.
My view of quantum philosophy, quantum science and mathematics has already been laid down to stake out the foundations; my efforts now are to blend characters who can hope to inhabit that territory for which there is no map.
Fiction as a proactive exploration as if the time we live in — caught between the last gasp of the twentieth-century arms race and the potentially luminous renaissance which beckons — demands nothing less than our full imaginative courage.
Feeling as if we are caught between Scylla and Charybdis has been our lot since long beforeThe Crying of Lot 49, and long before Odysseus set sail.
Along with the many fiddlers who have taken to the road, we are duty bound to look for the humor and compassion in each other wherever we can manage to find it.
For our road is constructed, not of asphalt, but of the people we meet and the minds we choose to communicate with — our sense of irony and compassion for self and other lighting the way.
In the quantum science I have learned, transmitted from the greatest minds of our time, is the comprehension that we are not alone in the universe, nor are we relegated to some distracted, abstracted observer.
The rope is long. The characters are busy. The music plays on, and somewhere in the overlap between probability and poetry, the story finds its footing. — K.W.N.
Five foundational columns. Each appears in every issue. Each is wired to the others.
Department
Homo Luminous
The psychology of AI anxiety and the dawn of a new species.
Ed. KW Norton
Department
The Chronicles
Dispatches from the Twelfth Night place of permanent superposition.
Ed. KW Norton
Department
Screaming Pequots
Rolling Home Exclusive — a supergroup convened by superposition.
Ed. KW Norton
Department
The Interlocutor
The notebook cross-examines the author. Defense becomes confirmation.
Ed. KW Norton
Department
Fusion Fiction
Literary fusion — so what says Miles.
Ed. KW Norton
Item ·
A poet of some renown was seen ordering a second martini at the Algonquin and muttering, audibly, about the cowardice of footnotes. The bartender, a man of discretion, refused to corroborate.
Item ··
Our Reno correspondent reports that the last honest bookie in town has retired to grow tomatoes. The tomatoes, she writes, are also crooked, but in a more forgivable way.
Item ···
The Editor was, against all medical advice, spotted dancing at a wedding in Bisbee. He claims it was a different editor. We have decided to believe him for the duration of this paragraph.