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Along with love, friendship is the most universal, enlivening, challenging, mercurial, and genuine of human experiences. Whereas
blood kinship is fated—our ancestors are our ancestors, like them or not, and so it is with parents and siblings—friendships are forged with people we choose, and continue to choose. People who become, in essence, a free-will kind of family, which, like our blood family, can be a strong source of happiness and, sometimes, of grand miseries. A friend is also one who becomes, as Aristotle proposed in his Nicomachean Ethics, essentially “another self.” But just as we have the capacity both to embrace and torment ourselves, so can Aristotle’s other selves do the same. Friendship, like selfhood, is a complex enterprise, a mixed bag.

This issue is a gathering of writings that address some of the myriad ways in which we encounter one another as friends. The
nimble dance between love and friendship is part of the dialogue. Staunch friendships and fraught ones. False friendships and fading ones. Friendships brought into being in the cauldron of illness, friendships that make us feel most alive. Friendships between people long dead and friendships that are still going strong. It’s a theme about which, over the millennia, much has been written, but one I believe readers of this issue will find framed and investigated in new ways.

Many of us involved with Conjunctions, writers and readers alike, unexpectedly lost a very dear friend earlier this year in the extraordinary poet, publisher, teacher, and longtime contributor to these pages, C. D. Wright. It is to her that Affinity is dedicated.

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