Freedom. It’s a beautiful thing, a necessary thing, the thing without which nothing else matters—“needful to man as air,” as Robert Hayden writes in his poem “Frederick Douglass.” But, like air, how can you hold freedom in your hand, or even know for certain when you have it, or keep it in your tenuous grasp? We all are moved to this quest, from children seeking the freedom of adulthood, to people looking for refuge from natural disaster or any of the many kinds of disaster man wreaks, to those working to throw off oppression. As Sigma Tau Deltans, we know that language is a powerful tool of liberation. Words can change the real state of human being, can remake a person from a slave to a citizen. In Cincinnati, the landing stage of the promised land for travelers on the Underground Railroad and the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe, we meet to seek the freedom that only the realm of the imaginary made real through language can create. What is the story of your search for freedom, that “beautiful, needful thing”?