Jane Armstrong

Editor's Introduction

When I posted the call for stories, essays, and poems about happiness, I didn’t expect much of a response.  We don’t do happiness very well, I thought.  We’re much more adept with trouble, deception, entanglements, threats, betrayal, despair, and darkness.  And why not?  Just read the daily news.  Sometimes we can manage a “happy ending,” but it’s likely to be ambiguous, bittersweet, or deeply ironic. 

So I was surprised to receive almost 400 submissions for this issue, all attempting to interrogate, contemplate, quantify, meditate upon the true nature and meaning of happiness; all of them were beautiful—a complete pleasure to read.

I can’t say that I found any definitive answers to the questions I posed in the call for submissions, but isn’t happiness found in the search itself?

I offer here 22 results from my search.  What is happiness?  It’s persimmons, pie after golf, your Darlin’ Pie’s kiss, the unexpected pleasures of solitude, dancing with your children, bread crumbs, falling leaves, new love, familiar love, frozen squirrels, the silence of snow.  It’s also none of those things, but 500,000 other things listed by google.  It’s a subject too ridiculous and embarrassing for serious study, but you can seriously study its science at a major American university. 

What is happiness?  Maybe it’s an attitude, a commitment to compassion, a mode of thinking and being, a way of viewing the world with kindness, even when everything feels so brutal and wrong.  And why not?

 Read, be happy, pass it on.

Jane Armstrong’s work has appeared in Newsweek, The North American Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, New Orleans Review and elsewhere.  She is an infrequent commentator for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and an editor at PublicScrutiny.net.  She teaches at Northern Arizona University.