Mere weeks into submission season for Exposition Review’s “PARA/SOCIAL” issue, Cambridge Dictionary named the term its Word of the Year. People are clearly hungry for something—intimate, perfectly tailored to their desires, malleable—that doesn’t rely on humanity living up to their expectations. We chose the theme at a moment of endless tension between artist and viewer, when the desire to know another soul completely coexisted with the desire to remain totally, blissfully unperceived.
But that’s not what we seek from parasocial connection. Rather, it’s the unpredictable human component that we need. We desire a conversation pit, not a technically perfect but unbearably sterile single-person pod.
The work in this issue travels the full range of the theme and its genres. In Feggo’s cartoon “New Immigrant,” the parasocial appears at its starkest: an asymmetry of who gets to see and who gets to be seen. In Nolan Knight’s flash fiction “Stardom,” it glitters and then crusts over with humanity, a brush with celebrity that can’t stay clean. And in Sofia Varino’s nonfiction “Goodbye to London,” it turns toward a place: a raw, explicitly queer reckoning with a city and everyone it deemed marginal. From a stranger’s glance to the dinner table to celebrity encounters, these pieces remind us the parasocial was never only about screens.
Year eleven for Exposition Review showed us that our journal exists far beyond screens as well. This season felt both old and new at once: We logged our highest number of submissions yet, more than a thousand writers trusting us with their words, along with another year of our publishing workshop for emerging writers. We marked Expo’s first full decade with A Decade of Art, a digital exhibition gathering ten years and twenty issues of visual art and comics into one space folks can wander from anywhere. We launched the exhibit at Literati Cafe in Los Angeles, where some of our earliest reading meetings were held, and there Expo artists made a connection more social and less para, seeing and being seen, taking questions from our audience face-to-face.
Which brings us back to the conversation pit. If the pod is where you’re perfectly served and never perceived, Exposition Review is the opposite: a place where writers and readers actually see each other, and are appreciated for who they are rather than what they perform. That’s what we’ve spent eleven years building—somewhere the knowledge goes both ways.
We’re grateful for all of it, but most of all for the writers who shared themselves with us, and for everyone who chose to be part of this: our volunteer readers and editors, our treasured interns, the artists who stepped out from behind their work, and the communities that hold up each person who touches Expo. It takes a village, and we’re endlessly glad we found ours
Rebecca Luxton
Laura Rensing
Editors-in-Chief