A Letter from the Editor

28^th March 2026

Dear Reader,

Welcome to our forty-first issue of StepAway Magazine. As I spent time with the poems and short stories gathered here, I found myself returning, again and again, to a particular mode of wandering: walking at the edges of the city, and walking through it after dark. Many of the pieces in this issue are drawn to these margins — post-industrial landscapes, dimly lit streets where the usual rhythms of urban life begin to tire. These are not fixed or stable places: they can be hushed or unruly, suspended or volatile, shaped as much by absence as by excess. In different ways, the work collected here explores what it means to encounter the city not at its busiest and brightest, but at its most exposed and intoxicating.

Much has been written about the flâneur as a creature of the boulevard, drifting through arcades and grand thoroughfares, observing the theatre of urban life. Charles Baudelaire imagined him as both participant and spectator, suspended in a state of curious detachment. Yet our wanderers are equally at home at the city’s edges, where spectacle does not diminish but changes, taking on forms that are less staged, less continuous, and no less real.

At night, the city both softens and hardens. Shop shutters descend, offices empty, and the purposeful stride of the commuter gives way to slower, less readable movements — but other intensities take hold. Space itself comes forward: the hum of distant traffic, the glow of artificial light, the echo of footsteps, the sudden nearness of other bodies. If the daytime flâneur reads the city as a text of abundance, the nocturnal wanderer reads it for what has withdrawn — and for what gathers in its wake.

The peripheries intensify this shift. Industrial estates, bypasses, retail parks after closing time — places designed for function, not for lingering. Marc Augé might recognise them as “non-places,” defined by transit rather than presence. Yet these spaces resist that definition. Stripped of their daytime purpose, they do not empty out so much as change register, becoming sites of drift, encounter, and sometimes unease.

Here, wandering becomes less about witnessing others and more about inhabiting a heightened awareness. To walk where one is not expected, to linger where there is nothing to buy, is a quiet refusal of the city’s dominant logic—but also an exposure to its sharper edges, where attention is not optional but necessary.

These spaces are by no means empty. They are shaped by different rhythms and different lives. The writers featured in this issue — Bob Beagrie, Oisín Breen, SJ Butler, David Capps, Craig Constantine, Irene Cunningham, William Doreski, Julie Egdell, John Grey, William S. Kilgore, Phil Kingston, Rodolfo G. Ledesma, Elizabeth McSkeane, and Kate Young — attend closely to these overlooked zones and hours, tracing the shifting textures of cities at their edges and in their quieter and more volatile moments. Together, their work reminds us that the urban experience is not confined to centres of activity, but extends into margins where meaning is harder won and never entirely secure.

Yours faithfully,

Darren Richard Carlaw

editor@stepawaymagazine.com