Front Matter

Editors' Message Whitman writes in "Reconciliation": For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near, Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin. In that act, in a gentle kiss that joins self and enemy, he reconciles and eases the pain of war's devastation. For Whitman, reconciliation is the "Word over all, beautiful as the sky," the deed that washes the world clean of the carnage of conflict. Without the act of reconciliation—the bringing together of that which was divided, of that which was estranged—the "soil" of war, its blood feuds, its hate, its fears, and its enmities—would linger to pollute the promise of a country and its people. Reconciliation is necessary to heal, to move on, to be at peace with, and to again flourish as a people in a nation once violently divided against itself and estranged. Teaching, too, relies on an ongoing act of reconciliation. Good teaching, Parker Palmer reminds us, comes from identity and integrity, and both have "as much to do with our shadows and our limits, our wounds and fears, as with our strengths and potentials" (13). To teach requires reconciling shadows and limits, wounds and fears with strengths and potentials: our own and our students'. The seven essays in this issue of JAEPL "bend down and touch lightly" fears, woes, and strengths to bring about a fruitful union of pain and healing; they do the work of reconciliation so necessary in teaching and in writing, pointing to ways in which we might similarly reconcile our own tensions. We open with a poignant plea from bell hooks for the work of reconciliation, a necessary prelude, she says, for writing and healing. Without reconciliation, she points out, writing cannot be therapeutic, it cannot heal that which is broken. The six essays that follow her supplication offer specific moments and specific methods of reconciliation, seeking to bring again into harmony relationships and forces that tug against each other. .