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As Sara Ahmed writes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, “challenging social norms involves having a different affective relation to those norms, partly by ‘feeling’ their costs as a collective loss” (196). In our third issue of Love & Theft, we invite you to experience the tug and pull between tradition and taboo, between inhibition and indulgence. Our contributors ask what it means to resist temptation, what it means to give in...

I think I hear quite well those things that are usually pushed away or repressed, and I want to catch and emphasize those moments. Those moments of hesitation, or of saying too much. The point is that a large part of what I write are real voices of real people, so my work is in a way like the work of a sculptor, who leaves these fragments bare, without additional content around them, and exposes them very strongly.

The woman climbs until she’s almost reached the crest. Then she stops, staring at something she sees off to one side of the path ahead. It is a tree, standing slightly above her by itself in the middle of a clearing. Its roots fan outward through the soil, and its branches spread against the sky. Its bark is gray, skin- smooth where not scarred. Its leaves are oval, jagged- edged, and they are just beginning to transform from deep green into brilliant gold.

It's just easier to say how I'm feeling hidden within the words, the same way as the artists that I take inspiration from. They hide their experiences or their emotions within the lyrics that are a little bit difficult to decipher, but it's still there and I can take away something from it.