Introductory Drift

Abstract

Confronted with spaces more than ever gridded and pre-arranged, mapped from the google universes to the nano-th degree, and already (over) saturated with the intentions of others, the contributors in this issue take up the general theme of drifts and drifting. The responses to our initial call range widely across genres (scholarly essays, fiction, nonfiction, film, accounts of performances), terrains (urban, rural, psychological, virtual), structures of feeling, and modes of locomotion from the pedestrian to the spectacular (a semi-truck). Several essays deliberately follow in the steps of the Situationist psychogeographers, such as Phil Smith and Clive Austin's playful dérive around Exeter, England, or Jim Miller's more sober-minded drift in downtown San Diego. Others chart a different trajectory as in Dianne Chisholm's account of Ellen Meloy's nomad raids on the nuclear-wasted desert or Casey Clabough's elegiac retracing of the Warrior's Path.