There is great beauty in this seasonal turmoil: leaves salute us with brilliant colors before deserting their branches, skies come alive with migrating birds and butterflies, fall flowers bloom to remind us of the coming spring.
 
This fall is also filled with unnatural turbulence—kinds and degrees of upheaval exclusive to the human race. Wars, civil and otherwise, continue to rage from Sudan and Gaza to Myanmar and Ukraine—bringing with them starvation, disease, pillage, and rape. People fleeing from poverty, cruelty, and destruction cram into unseaworthy vessels, many dying in their desperate quest for a  better, safer life. Around the world, detention and refugee camps and homeless centers are filled beyond capacity with exiled, suspect, and/or damaged people about whom many in the more fortunate world would prefer to forget. And, in a variety of places and ways, political tremors threaten the vaunted stability of a number of more fortunate countries—including the United States.
 
“The only constant in life is change,” Heraclitus of Ephesus reportedly said. And change is often traumatic. Members of the world’s epically diverse creative/artistic community are in unique positions to react to, influence, and inspire debate about the shifting social and political currents now roiling our fragile planet, as they are to reveal the inner workings of the human mind and spirit and to celebrate the ever-changing natural world. And older women members of the arts community—a group whose work Persimmon Tree was created to publish and celebrate — bring a special wealth of experience and wisdom to this vital mission of the arts. It is a mission that requires a special brand of bravery. As poet Audre Lorde wrote in her poem, “A Litany for Survival,”
 

 
This issue of Persimmon Tree is bursting with written, visual, and musical creations— inspiring testaments to the determination, conscience, and powers of observation and reflection of the women whose work you’ll find in these pages.
 
With her introduction, “To Make the Broken Whole,” Poetry Editor Cynthia Hogue presents the work of Alison Hawthorne Deming, a poet “deeply, literally engaged with the natural sciences, environmental history, and social justice.”
 
Art Editor Greta Berman celebrates Joan Thorne and her brilliant, kinetic, abstract paintings.
 
Susan Kane describes her long road to becoming a singer/songwriter in an article introduced by Music Editor Gena Raps.
 
Change, of many kinds, is a connecting thread in the six stories in the Fiction section; and changing perspectives resonate in the gripping essays included in Nonfiction. Two additional essays, on process and inspiration, comprise The Creative Life section.
 
Guest Short Takes Editor Linda Barrett Osborne eloquently introduces prose and poetry with a wide range of perspective on the theme “Putting It All Away.”
 
And, in the Persimmon Tree Forum, members of our growing community voice their concerns over the U.S. government’s current campaign that seems devoted to “Censoring History.” “How to abort this new censoring of history? I wish to the goddess I knew!,” one Forum contributor writes. But she has ideas — as do many others whose views you will read. These thoughtful, outspoken women, writing on a crucial topic in this tumultuous and often discouraging era, remind us of Mary Shelley’s pithy and encouraging observation, “The beginning is always today.”
 
Enjoy this issue. And please use the Comment pane at the end of each article to let us know what you think.