This issue of The Circular was originally themed around family, plain and simple. But further into the curation process, I found a common thread running through the pieces I’d picked: the pull to fall into our family’s footsteps, consciously or unconsciously, sometimes to our benefit, sometimes to our harm.

Nick Kilner recalls a time he looked up to his older brother, and the eventual realisation that he didn't want to follow his brother’s path of self-destruction. In Hoa Pham’s personal essay about treated for psychosis, she observes, 'My stories overlap with others, my grandmother’s stories, my mother’s stories, my family’s stories. They are part of my being and who I am.'

Marie O’Rourke writes about the role of patterns in her mother’s, grandmother’s and aunts’ lives: the consolation taken in the pattern of domestic tasks, but also the harmful patterns of marital abuse and forced domesticity these women had to endure.

May Ngo observes the hopeful idealism she shares with her father’s younger self when he was a Chinese-Cambodian recruit in the Vietnamese Communist army. Safdar Ahmed scolds his siblings for neglecting their father, who has vascular dementia, only to be accused of behaving like their dad once did.

To quote Hoa Pham’s essay again, 'Narrative is a form of hindsight. A way of drawing patterns from random experiences, making sense of life with crises and turning points'. Perhaps seeing patterns is an inevitable part of processing our family stories.