Lives are defined by challenges. Meaning is constructed out of what emerges from the obstacles, deviations and detours we encounter. This issue explores those junctions; the intersections where one experience terminates and gives way to another. The junctions that present new relationships and sever old ones, that propel our passage away from one home and towards another, that can both provide opportunities and demolish our security.

How aware are we of these junctions when they occur? Do we know the moments that will define us as they command and herald change? The moments that might require decisiveness or flexibility, strength or calm. Where paths converge or diverge, each charged with the hope of transformation, and weighted with the threat of rupture, collapse or stagnancy. Or are these moments ours only in retrospect? 

As this collection demonstrates, the junctions we traverse can both ensure and devastate our sense of agency over our lives. And they come into sharp relief through the stories we tell about who we are and how we got here. 

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This issue is comprised of the writing and artwork of young people, originally from Democratic Republic of Congo and now living in Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda. The selected stories examine the junctions of their lives, the moments pregnant with opportunity and ripe with danger. The moments when their very survival was at stake, when chance encounters led to friendship and opportunity, and when familial betrayal or political violence threatened to destroy families, homes, and livelihoods.  

The authors participated in a series of remote storytelling workshops offered by members of the Otherwise editorial collective. In these workshops, authors gathered around a table in the Elite Humanitarian Service Team Centre, with its cement floor, tin roof and the workshop facilitator projected on a wall, to explore creative writing elements like story shape and structure, narrative voice, setting, and the role of memory, as they crafted their stories for submission to this issue of Otherwise. 

Stories, at the most fundamental level, are crafted and shared for an audience. The act of creating and recreating these stories is exercised collectively, in constant dialogue with others. This is particularly true for young people, who are deeply immersed in a process of defining themselves in the complex network of their social worlds. In addition to undergoing the process of editorial critique familiar to all authors and artists published in Otherwise, the authors featured in this issue were matched with other young writers to participate in a collaborative process of peer review. As they engaged with the critical feedback of both their peers and editorial team, they demonstrated the complex interplay through which stories and perspectives are transformed intersubjectively. 

 

The possibility and scope for storytelling is radically diminished when power dynamics are altered in the context of displacement, violence and trauma. In circumstances of social rupture, we might consider narrative storytelling as a coping mechanism. The very act of telling stories allowing a means through which to interpret and infuse meaning into circumstances and events that seem beyond control. This occurs, not simply through the repetition of events, but through a process of critique and manipulation of those events – the defining junctions – necessary for their retelling. 

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The stories and images in this issue were selected from those produced in a series of remote workshops delivered by Otherwise collective members Laura Moran, Grace Zhou, Jose Sherwood Gonzalez, Letizia Bonanno and Olivia Casagrande, with Roberto Cayuqueo, author Nicole Helget and journalist and teacher William Laforme. The project was funded through the Wenner-Gren Engaged Research Grant project, Sociality of the Story: Harnessing the Transformative Power of Storytelling through Ethnographic Exchanges Among Refugee Youth, and emerged in partnership with Stone Soup, a children’s literary magazine, and Elite Humanitarian Service Team, a refugee-founded and led non-profit working with young people in Nakivale Refugee Settlement.