Quick Tour: A context for contents

Tiny fists will flail the air. Tender lungs will squall in protest. Surgical chrome or flinty stone will sever the umbilical. Some voice in hospital or hovel will utter blessing or curse, and our mother earth, this island universe, will issue its 6 billionth living soul. Some say it's happened already. After all, people-counting is not an exact science. We have no universal census taker in this hive of humanity, where populations refuse to hold steady.

Wars, plagues and natural disasters render untidy the task of predicting departures, so there's no way to calculate precisely when live births overtake deaths sufficiently to produce this mythic number—6 billion.

Experts suggest one in seven people ever born are alive today. Take what comfort you can, but I don't think that means you stand a one in seven chance of never dying. Actually, the ratio may be as low as one in 20. As I say, people-counting business, like most monkey-business, is not exact.

Still, the population of each nation is known to an astonishing degree, so that most experts believe the 6 billionth living person has checked in. And at the current rate, three seconds later, number 6 billion-plus-one arrived too.

Because more boys are born into the world than girls—men compensate by dying younger—the six billionth soul is likely a male. He's also likely to be Asian or African and quite poor, although I'm sure some entrepreneur would gladly lavish riches upon him. Tell him what he's won, Bob!

"Lo Pi, in honor of your distinction as the six billionth human being alive on the planet, you have won a gold-plated Porsche, custom-designed for the 21st century; lifetime subscriptions to Primestar, America Online and Fax-Master; a gift basket of hygiene articles and pharmaceuticals; a world cruise to be taken with your guardian of choice, a new refrigerator...."

In reality, his generation will inherit gifts far more precious and ominous. Like all of us, they will inherit that ultimate gift we squander daily—a child's awe at the mystery of existence. And they will be given the penultimate gift of a clean slate—a brand new millennium—that, with the help of the Lord, wise leaders and technologies bordering on the mystical, might yet put an end to 20th century bugaboos such as genocide, world war and genetic diseases.

On the other hand, they will be borne on a tide of exploding populations that more than tripled in this century alone, and likely will triple again in the next. A world in which a billion Asians may soon be plugging in ozone-depleting refrigerators and igniting smog-generating automobile engines.

A world in which species are dying off at the fastest rate in history, and in which oxygen-generating rain forests are slashed and burned for short-term profits. A world in which each decade is hotter than the one before. A world brimming with weapons, including new generations of un-needed armaments that force sales of used weapons to the highest bidders.

Still, I tend to be an optimist. The next generation may well inherit an ever evolving global consciousness. A larger number just might inherit democracy, human rights and prosperity than any generation in history. Our children may lay claim to the material and spiritual resources of space, communicate with civilizations from other stars—maybe even wise old creatures with solutions to our most pressing problems. Who's to say? It's near certain they'll inherit incredible technologies for growing foods and recombining the world's elements to produce new abundance and, perhaps, ever-increasing life-spans.

Even now scientists are analyzing all the things that make us mortal and, therefore, graveyard bound. Some suggest the first virtually immortal human being is alive already—a thought so scary, so exhilarating, it brings a pause. And so I pause, even if the world never does. Here's to you, Number Six Billion, wherever, whenever, you may be. Here's hoping your world is as rich, wonderful, and well-tended as the worlds contained in this book....

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It's been said that every story, every poem worth its salt, delineates a world. Never in the four-year history of New Millennium Writings has that insight been more clear than in the prose and poems contained herein. From the stone-carver in David E. Joyner's first piece of published fiction, 'El Premio,' to the internal consciousness of astronaut Ed Mitchell in 'Man and the Moon.' From the boy intent on returning his dead father's 'Seven League Boots' in Lance Weller's well-wrought tale—I call it Pacific Northwest Gothic—to the middle-aged man who grasps a slippery handful of truth in Scott McNutt's 'Forgetting Salvation,' these stories prove compelling. Equally compelling is the nonfiction herein. Take Sarah Maté's poetry-festooned memoir of the late Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov in our Janus File—a look back at a writer for the ages. Or consider the heart-felt reality of Diana Sabot's loss attendant to the marriage of a friend in 'Best Woman,' our Creative Nonfiction offering. It's hard to imagine more divergent worlds than those National Book Award winner Cormac McCarthy and Maxwell Perkins Prize winner Leslie Garrett were experiencing around the time of Leslie's death. I was there as Leslie reached his lowest ebb, just as his old friend, Cormac, won his greatest fame. Just as compelling, and even more timely, is 'Elegy for Matthew Shepard' by poet Wendell Ricketts, who shapes a terrible beauty from the leavings of a hate crime. Then again, all of the poetry herein is distinctive in tone, subject or style. They range from the playfulness of Marilyn Kallet and Bill Noble to the sweet earnestness of Laura Still and Linda Parsons Marion, whose smiling face is the first to greet the lucky reader who opens this book from the back. That's where you'll encounter Linda's pithy advice in The Writing Well. Continue turning, and you'll encounter humor, photography, biographical information and more. I hope you'll agree, NMW brims with worlds worth exploring.

Don Williams, Editor