Language, whether spoken or written, whether seen or heard, can hurt as well as heal. It can confine and it can liberate. The mere words we choose can turn boundaries into borders, walls into bridges, and mountainous obstacles into navigable passages. As the famed linguist Michael Halliday describes, language constitutes a semiotic system, “not in the sense of a system of signs, but a systemic resource for meaning” (1985). In this sense, he explains, language is social in nature as it may be “the creature and creator of human society” (2002). By using the language in this way, we unlock its potential not merely for construing reality but for constructing—indeed, for transforming—ourselves and the world around us.

Each of the literary pieces in this volume of International Voices skillfully unlocks that potential concerning the power of language by instantiating a diverse set of voices in and through literary narrative. The narratives are certainly different from one another in that they relate the individual stories and experiences across literary genres and styles, fictional as well as nonfictional. In addition, they reveal differing perspectives, values, beliefs, and assumptions concerning the people, places, and things included within their narrative frames.

These narrative frames involve the following: a reflection on the cycle of life and death; a treatise on the relationship between language and the source of creation; an intimate trajectory from isolating depression to human engagement and ultimate obsession; a story of the emotional effects after a night’s revels; a shared momentary escape into the natural wonders of a vacation retreat; and a series of poetic reflections on the fragmenting effects of isolation and the tenuous nature of human connectedness.

Within these narrative frames, each literary piece, in turn, employs vivid literary language that allows the individual voices of the writers to emerge—voices that are imbued with power and agency through expression. While their stories may express experiences that are different from our own as the readers, and while they are expressed at times in ways that may difficult for us to hear, the language compels us to listen. We must recognize those voices breaking through the darkness of silence and isolation, and we are engaged in a meaningful discourse beyond the page itself. It is a discourse that wholly values the diversity of perspectives enriching our lives as students, as faculty, and—most importantly—as citizens of the world.

Mark A. Ouellette, Ph.D. Director of ICAPE