Barking Sycamores 6

Popular culture is an inescapable component of our daily lives. Turn on a television, read a publication, surf on your smartphone - and you partake in some fashion. Even if you disconnect from media or technology, the sum of your prior experiences and interactions with pop culture continue to stay with you, shaping your thoughts and even your selves long after exposure to it. Whether you love, hate, critique, remain indifferent to, or choose to ignore a particular aspect of it, the fact is - it becomes a part of you.

For Issue 6, we chose the theme of pop culture because we were interested particularly in how neurodivergent folk process and interact with it. From the submissions we received, popular culture proved to be a power presence in the lives of our contributors. Sometimes it was a distraction, nuisance, or negative influence; other times it proved to be simply ubiquitous background noise; and in other instances it was a welcome obsession, a source of inspiration, or sources of enjoyment and relaxation. The contributors took bits of popular culture - either singularly or combined together - and reinterpreted them to create a range of work in many shades: humorous and witty, insightful, stunningly beautiful, and darkly disturbing.

We are proud to present this issue to our readers. Given more time, we surely would have collected more work and been able to present a much larger range of commentary on popular culture. However, we invite you to read, consider, and enjoy what our contributors offer here. We are also delighted to present Christopher Wood-Robbins as our cover artist and his piece, "Reaching for your Dreams;" additionally, one of his poems is included in this issue Also, as a special feature we'll present a poem by our editor-in-chief N.I. Nicholson at the end of the issue period.

Thank you for reading and supporting Barking Sycamores, as we continue into our second year of publication. The future is so highly illuminated that we find it necessary to wear protective eyewear with darkened or polarized lenses.