I Have a Time Machine

But unfortunately it can only travel into the future
at a rate of one second per second,
which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant
committees and even to me.
But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next
moment and to the next.
Thing is, I can’t turn it off. 

Time is a curious business. These lines from poet Brenda Shaughnessy help illustrate why. The Curator’s been on hiatus for almost a year, shutting down just before COVID-19 shut down everything else. In the intervening months, that rate of speed—one second per second—has felt slower still. There’s a chasm between what was last year at this time, and what is now.

The Curator itself is a curious business. Maybe in the truest sense: sparked by curiosity. Founded in the late oughts as an arm of the International Arts Movement, the magazine was meant to showcase that organization’s commitment to the intersection of arts and faith. As founding editor Alissa Wilkinson put it, The Curator was designed to be

aggressively omnivorous, which would merrily ignore the established periodical wisdom of “timeliness” and simply go after culture in an exuberant, wide-ranging celebration of the best things humans make and do.

Over the years, though five editors have come and gone, though The Curator has sometimes slowed its publication schedule, and sometimes ceased outright, the mission has remained the same: to celebrate the best things humans make and do. 

At the end of last year, we celebrated things made and done over the previous decade, and we hope to enter a post-election era which allows us space to practice attention—that is, sharing the objects of artists and writers and poets and filmmakers and anyone moving alertly through the landscape. 

We need guides to help us see the fruits of their craft, and that’s where you come in. We need writers of the sort Wilkinson described in these pages a decade ago: 

Many magazines have a carefully cultivated voice and audience; The Curator has thrived on cultivating individual voices. Some editors assign articles; The Curator’s offerings are almost exclusively driven by the delight and interest of its contributors.

In preparation for our relaunch, we have expanded our editorial team. We are returning to publishing new work every week. And we want your help. Check out what we’re doing, share the news of our return, and pitch and submit your work. See how you might join us in pointing out what is delightful and what is interesting as we move together through space,  one second at a time.