Wrath-Bearing Tree was established by a small group of combat veterans in 2013 and has published all kinds of prose and poetry related to the topic of military service, violence, trauma, and resulting mental and emotional health challenges. We tend to agree with Kafka that good art should “affect us like a disaster, grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves.” But we also believe that Kafka’s own work shows that the best, most difficult art manages to see something on the other side of disaster. We have no idea what that something is. Edmund Burke called it the sublime, “a complex pleasure,” which came out of imminent terror and pain and produced “the strongest emotions which the mind is capable of feeling.” William Blake said that “if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.” It’s hard to say who is right. It’s possible they are both wrong. Help us out. Send us your best fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. You don’t have to be a veteran, or write about war. Just hit us over the head with something.