DEAR READER,

What you hold in your hands is APIARY X: a culmination of ten years of writing, reading, making, printing, listening, dancing, and building together in our home, Philadelphia. It is a living document of the people that shape our shifting, evolving literary city. And it is a long time coming! Thank you for believing in this scrappy magazine, which first sprouted between friends in a South Philly apartment in 2009. Your support and community is our water and light: we could not grow without you.

Our tenth anniversary issue celebrates friends new and old. You’ll find freshly published work in conversation with voices from issues 1-9, alongside intergenerational interviews with local lit heroes reflecting on Philly's past, present and future. Digging through a decade of APIARY’s archives, we were frequently surprised, delighted, and touched by all the criss-crossing connections between our authors and collaborators: like meeting someone new at a party, then finding out they used to live on your corner years ago. We hope you'll feel that way too as you peruse these pages.

Where you stand holding this issue marks the “X” in our title. X means “you are here.” It means “we were, too.” X is a place to pause on the map: a person’s proof of passing through, of being seen, held, found. It’s a point lodged between neighborhoods and tangled timelines, trolley tracks and graveyards, layers of living rooms and far-flung future coordinates. X is both treasure and burial, evidence and erasure, a crossing-over and a crossing-out. An anonymous signature. A street marked for construction.  A stitch in time binding us.

APIARY X is where we’ve been. It’s also where we’re headed. Let’s go together.

XO,

The APIARY Staff