A Luminous Threshold Between Islands and Imagined Distances

There are moments in the life of a literary project when a new edition does more than arrive — it erupts, like a tide that has been gathering strength far beyond the visible shoreline. The fourteenth edition of Filamentos emerges precisely from that hidden swell: a confluence of memory, diaspora, imagination, and the stubborn radiance that binds the Azores to its scattered continents of belonging.

Since its founding in February 2023, Filamentos has traced a cartography of voices suspended between archipelago and dispersal, mapping not a geography but a sensibility — that tremor of recognition by which islanders and exiles answer one another across oceans. In this new edition, that dialogue intensifies. The pages do not merely host literature; they host returns, recognitions, rediscoveries of the first sea that shaped us. Each text feels like an island calling to another island, each poem a bridge suspended between cliff and horizon.

What distinguishes Filamentos 14 is not only its breadth of contributors — fiction, poetry, critical essays, historical inquiries, and diasporic meditations — but the sense that a collective imagination has reached a deeper stratum of its own consciousness. Within these pages, the Azorean world becomes both intimate and vast: a place where the sacred ordinary unfolds in Sam Pereira’s luminous irreverence, where the unspoken chapters of our past surface in studies on slavery in the islands, and where contemporary fiction and criticism reclaim the complexities of desire, memory, and the political pulse of our time.

This edition also marks a pivotal turning point: the renewal of the journal’s editorial rhythm, now embracing four expansive issues a year, each one a curated constellation drawn from the vibrant multiplicity of the growing platform filamentosarteseletras.art. With this recalibrated tempo, Filamentos enters a phase of maturity — not older, but sharper, more deliberate, more attuned to the luminous plurality it seeks to honor.

To read Filamentos 14 is to enter a corridor of echoes:
of ancestral histories resurfacing;
of new literary cartographers sketching the future;
of Azorean and diasporic imaginations refusing the smallness of borders.

It is also to witness a community — writers, translators, artists, thinkers, and readers — forging a cultural body whose pulse stretches across continents. Nothing here exists alone; every contribution is a filament threading the Atlantic, tightening the weave between what we were, what we are, and what we may yet become.

May this edition reach its readers as the tide reaches a basalt cliff: bringing something ancient, something unforeseen, something deeply ours and yet newly revealed. For this long, luminous conversation between islands and diaspora has no foreseeable end — nor should it. Its purpose is precisely to continue, widening our sense of home with every voice that joins it.

Read it here…