Fiddleblack #5 offers creative documentation on a microcosm. In this issue, we consider sprawl and suburbia rather voyeuristically. We slip into the rooms of neo-colonial revivals, half-timbered neo-Tudors, through their heated garages and mud rooms, past wet bars and warm open floor plans on a quest for aseity in an unnatural kind of space.

This issue marks our first attempt to require that our writers submit work not only in adherence with our mission statement, but also set to a particular theme. It’s a good batch of reading, exhibiting stresses the land has put on these stories’ characters, demonstrating a potential for near-duress brought upon by the neatly drafted proximities suburban life can bring.

In Daniel Roberts’ “Sport Hill Road,” we see a millennial family realizing its limitations, and in John McDermott’s “Empties,” we revisit Lords of Dogtown in the light of the Great Recession. Elsewhere in this issue, we experience different considerations of self, and what residential life may bring.