311.3 Fall 2026

Table of Contents

FROM THE EDITORS 

Dr. Eugene Lyman Fisk spent most of the summer of 1931 on the rugged Brittany Coast. He enjoyed the dramatic granite cliffs, the fresh air, the wild seaside headlands: a change of pace from his home in New York City. On a trip inland, he stopped at his daughter’s apartment in Paris to meet his new grandson, named Eugene in his honor, before continuing his journey to Dresden and the famous German Hygiene Museum, where the second International Hygiene Exhibition had been welcoming visitors for more than a year. In the Place of Nations building, Dr. Fisk would find the exhibit on prolonging the human lifespan that he himself had helped to prepare as the Medical Director of the Life Extension Institute (LEI). He was most eager, however, to see the museum’s chief attraction: the Gläserner Mensch, or Transparent Man. Visible through the life-sized model’s plastic skin were the skeleton, blood vessels, digestive, urinary, and endocrine systems. He was a modern marvel, arms raised aloft as though in blessing, in praise, in prayer for a hopeful, healthy future.

Alas, Dr. Fisk would never get to see the Transparent Man. Upon his arrival in Dresden on the morning of July 5, he suffered a stroke and was taken to the Johannstadt Hospital, where he died around noon. For a man who inspired so many people to question seventy years as the natural length of a human life, to die at the age of sixty-four seems especially pitiable. He’d been at the height of his career, having written multiple influential books, including the wildly popular How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science, then in its eighteenth edition. He often contributed essays to journals with a wide circulation to promote the work of LEI. For example, his 1920 essay in the North American Review, “On Prolonging Human Life,” touched on many of the main ideas he’d been articulating for years. He’d spent his entire professional life promoting periodic medical examinations, a healthy diet, and regular exercise as a way to live longer, healthier lives. He was absolutely certain that “the span of human life could easily be extended well beyond one hundred years.” Not surprisingly, LEI also advocated scientific management of the population through eugenic policies and practices, promising to “reduce the stream of gross deficiency by some means of controlling breeding” so that “the real man” may bring about “some higher race of organisms yet to appear.” From Gläserner Mensch to Übermensch.

The Life Extension Institute represents one among many modern attempts to wrest control from nature to the benefit of man: man because their focus skewed decidedly masculine. In her essay “Masculinity, Work, and the Fountain of Youth,” Laura Davidow Hirshbein argues that LEI “constructed a picture of healthy, vigorous, and efficient American working men that helped to cement ideals of masculinity to ideals of health.” LEI’s message: Real men don’t get old.

A century later and that manly message has become manic—if not downright maniacal. What is mogging, looksmaxing, much less the MMA fight on the South Lawn of the White House but manospheric machismo reified? Men’s fear of the loss of power and physical prowess dominates American culture so thoroughly that our Secretary of Defense announced the military’s new gender affirming care screening program “for testosterone deficiency … . Warfighters age thirty and over are going to be tested annually as part of their periodic health assessment … . If treatment is recommended, it’s entirely your choice to receive testosterone replacement therapy.” His body, his choice.

Far from masculinist angst over life extension, in these pages you’ll find essays, poems, stories, and visual art that both grieve and celebrate the lives of those who have been lost, including our longtime Cover Art Editor Gary Kelley, lovingly memorialized by Managing Editor Emily Stowe to open this issue.

In his moving essay “I Don’t Usually Talk Like This,” selected by Jessica Hendry Nelson as the winner of the Terry Tempest Williams Creative Nonfiction Prize, Michael William Palmer remembers a friend lost to suicide twenty years ago; Jenny Catlin sounds a lament for dead friends from her punk rock youth in “Elegy for the Vanishing Men”; Laura Pritchett’s “The Last Haircut” articulates a difficult truth about her dying, difficult mother; and Nathaniel Van Yperen’s “Lovewell” challenges notions of violent masculinity, recounting a hike with four friends, three of whom have since died. Characters in Emily Holland’s short story “On the Waterfront” suffer the deaths of two father figures, and grief joins the pervasive specter of death to haunt the entire world in Trent Long’s “The Mouth.” We sit with a father in hospice in Sara Hovda’s poem “Mayberry Elegy”; Carrie Shipers’s “Kill Switch II” copes with the seemingly quick death of her father; and on the occasion of his wife’s mother’s death, Curtis Bauer offers a bit of hardearned wisdom in “From This Distance”: “What hubris / to think I can control what I want, when. Remove pain, discomfort.”

To life extensionists and masculinists alike who believe they might finally see completely through the Transparent Man and find a solution to human decline, death is the ultimate insult. All rage, they remain uninterested in elegy. We respond to their anxiety with Kelle Groom’s fierce goodbye to her father in “A Doorway,” closing this issue with an opening to the underworld: “I am flinging all my love through / the doorway take it take it take it to him.” 

Essay, story, poem, art: these are love thus flung. Take it. ⬤