The essays published in this issue represent survival and change, expressed through dramatic stories and intimacy of detail. As editor Lee Gutkind writes in the issue's introduction: "One lesson that writers of all genres need to know is that the secret to making prose and poetry memorable and therefore vital and important is to catalog with specificity the details that are most intimate. By intimate I mean ideas and images that readers won't easily imagine—ideas and images you observed that symbolize a memorable truth about the characters or the situations that concern you."

In "Second Chances," Melissa Block, a breast-cancer survivor, is off on her own quest to Vietnam with a crew of plastic surgeons, while Philip Gerard's journey, "Adventures in Celestial Navigation," captures the intimacy of sailing and seeing blindly at night. Aine Greaney travels with her father on a mission of connection and maturity through a sensory panorama of Ireland. In "Bridges," Sarah Massey-Warren thrusts her readers into the stark and vivid reality of Elko, Nevada, while Russell Tomlin, in "Two Years," leads us into Togo, West Africa, on a Peace Corps mission.

This issue is out of print.