Dear reader,
Earlier this summer, I went on a road trip to see some of the Western national parks for the first time. The day I drove through Death Valley National Park, temperatures reached 122 degrees. I stopped for water at the park’s visitor center, in a town aptly named Furnace Creek. Inside, I overheard two people asking park staff what to do: their cars had broken down from the heat.
I grew up in Norway, where summers are lovely. (They almost make up for the winters.) The kind of heat I felt in Furnace Creek was intense to me not only because of the physical sensation, but because I found it so foreign.
In Yohanca Delgado’s interview with Mary South for this issue, South notes, “it’s interesting that the definition of apocalypse is a big, grand, sudden event, when one of the main worries that could cause huge shifts in how we live our lives is a slow kind of apocalypse.”
For most of my life, apocalypse was a word I associated with speculation. Science fiction, disaster movies, cult predictions. Lately, and especially while working on this issue, I have come to think of it as a word that can describe the present.
The Death Valley National Park gift shop sold water bottles illustrated with a desert bighorn sheep and the text DON'T DIE TODAY, a slogan that was as quippy as it was sincere. I think of many of the contributions to this issue of MQR Mixtape as being part of the same genre as the water-bottle design, attempts at responding somehow, through art, to a calamity that is looming or already here.
I am grateful to MQR Editor Khaled Mattawa for giving me the opportunity to work on this project. H. R. Webster, Jessica Wolking, and Katie Raymond provided crucial support throughout the publication process. I want to sincerely thank Elinam Agbo and Justin Balog, part of the first team of guest editors for MQR Mixtape. Finally, I'd like to thank you, for reading.
Eirill Falck
Guest editor, MQR Mixtape issue II
