The third annu­al fic­tion issue is avail­able on the mag­a­zine’s web­site. From my introduction:

I remem­ber a friend once telling me if you do some­thing once, it’s a weird thing you do. Do it again, it’s a trend. Do it three times and it’s a tra­di­tion every­one expects you to repeat till the end of time. This is Friends Jour­nal’s third Novem­ber fic­tion issue in a row. I guess this is a thing we do now.

It’s not imme­di­ate­ly obvi­ous that we should be in this game. Quak­ers have had tes­ti­monies against read­ing made-up sto­ries. They’re a waste of time. We’re “Friends of the Truth” after all, a con­cept tak­en quite lit­er­al­ly and some­times to extremes by ear­ly Quak­ers. Colo­nial Penn­syl­va­nia Quak­ers half-heartedly con­duct­ed a witch tri­al (pop­u­lar leg­end has it that after a defen­dant admit­ted to fly­ing on broom­sticks, William Penn dis­missed the case with the argu­ment that he knew “no law what­ev­er against it.”). A cen­tu­ry lat­er, abo­li­tion­ist trav­el­ing min­is­ter John Wool­man tried to shut down a mag­ic show in his home town of Mount Hol­ly, N.J., for encour­ag­ing superstitions.

But some­times fic­tion reveals deep­er truths that sim­ple report­ing can’t touch. Good sto­ry­telling can pro­duce pow­er­ful para­bles, sim­ple sto­ries that stay with us and guide us. And with a touch of mag­ic, it can hint at the mys­ter­ies of worship.

From The Truth of Untruth, my intro­duc­tion to the Novem­ber 2023 issue.

The first fea­tured short sto­ry is Annalee Flower Horne’s Refuse All Their Col­ors, an alter­na­tive his­to­ry of 1777 Val­ley Forge in which the Friends liv­ing in the area have a lit­tle extra skillset. Once you’ve read it you can watch my inter­view with Annalee, which I found par­tic­u­lar­ly fas­ci­nat­ing. Annalee has made a deep dive into the his­tor­i­cal record of the Friends com­mu­ni­ty in Val­ley Forge and is quite con­fi­dent that the only made-up part of the sto­ry is the fan­ta­sy ele­ments and the imme­di­ate dialogue.