When did you and I become inevitable?

You were there, and so was I.

In the first nano-second of creation. In the first glimmerings of matter and energy spun into space and time...

Our destinies were forged in the ripples and waves of first particles.

A uniformly expanding universe would have remained forever featureless. None of the stars and planets would have condensed out of the cosmic mix. And without them, the carbon, calcium, iron, and other elements would have been impossible. Humankind, "the paragon of animals," would have been impossible. For we, essentially, are star stuff.

Pardon me if I sound like the last Carl Sagan. Lately I've been attending programs at a local planetarium. And each time I do, the point is driven home. All looking outward is a looking backward. The further we peer into space and time, the closer we come to the point of origins.

Sometime back I read Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye's book about the epic struggle by physicists and astronomers to map the size, shape, history and destiny of the universe. These hard-science philosophers have not ripped down the veil obscuring first origins, but they have pushed it backward in time. some have demonstrated that 12 to 15 billion years ago, during the first milli-seconds of the Big Bang, the universe was no larger than a grapefruit, and before that, it was infinitely smaller. Small enough to fit inside a match-box, a thimble... and so on.

Yet even then, the cosmos was not a uniform place. Ripples and waves roiled the folds of light and other particles with names like quarks, masons, neutrinos. All forms of matter and anti-matter swirled in a hyper-heated elixir. You were there and so was I.

Perhaps inevitably. Perhaps accidentally. But certainly potentially, in that first ticking of the embryonic clock, as someone called it, we were implicit. It was in those first ripples of a miniature universe that galaxies, with their attendant stars, planets, oceans and, eventually, spiraling strands of DNA, became not only possible, but, some would say, inevitable. We see now a universe composed of streams and pools and rivers of flowing galaxies that extend for hundreds of billions of light-years, and arranged as if floating on the surfaces of gigantic soap bubbles.

It is a universe awash in earth, fire, wind and water. The materials of which we are made, say the scientists was forged inside stars. Only in those nuclear ovens does sufficient heat and pressure exist to forge the stuff of which our hearts and bones are made. Stars, expanding and exploding, fling such materials into space, so that Sagan - a man who claimed to know God only in the formulas of physics - could say, "We are beings born of stars," You have known such awe, and so have I.

As a child I had ambitions of understanding such things, but over the years I've come to savor the not-knowing, the retained child-like wonder that I never overcame. It's enough to know that larger minds considered space and time, gained a measure of understanding, and came away expressing awe at a universe that once resided in a thimble full of star-stuff.

And that you were there, and so was I. Writers in all times reveal, consciously or not, such awe, even while wrestling with what it all means.

Take the writers in this volume, which may be our best yet. NMW contributing editor Fred Brown and co-author Jean McDonald chronicle novelist Lee Smith's struggle to distill meaning from the sights, sounds and personalities in the mountains of her youth. Of consider Marilyn Kallet's interview with prize-winning poet, Lucille Clifton, whose search for meaning was brought into sharp relief by a life-and-death kidney transplant from the daughter she once tried to abort. Irony in a lighter key accrues to Edgar Allan Poe, who had no inkling of how his work would shape the future of letters. Not to worry. Fantasy writer Laura J. Underwood cues him in with a face-to-face tribute - our first fictive Janus File. Consider the other fiction here-in. Stories by David Hunter, Heidi Krauth, Tara L. Masih and yours truly present people pausing at crossroads of self-discovery. Some reach those cross-roads at a young age, as in Linda Seals (Talbert)'s First Fiction. Others confront them again and again, their whole lives long, as you'll find in Bob Levy's haunting tapestry of treasured family lore. Bob won our New Millennium Awards VI fiction competition. Just as compelling is Ann Peters' "The Bridge Jumpers," the true account of how the ghost of an elegant architectural wonder haunts a landscape of war and squalor. Read Clair Bateman's metaphysical poem, "The Fall," and a variety of visions in our Poetry Suite, including three on Hemingway by David Ray, and a poem by the late Richard Elman, to whom we dedicate this issue. Writing Well columnist Linda Parsons finds objects worthy of wonder in everyday life. To round things out, cartoonist Charlie Daniel provides humor, Jack Neely deconstructs 'decadism,' and photographers Paul Efirt and Richard P. Remine, along with illustrator Mark Maxwell, serve up the visuals. For best results, read with a sense of child-like wonder.

Don Williams, Editor