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Issues of The White Review are not planned around a theme, but sometimes one asserts itself Speaking to the writer Margo Jefferson, Zinzi Clemmons suggests we might think of Jefferson’s work as ‘arguing for nuance in order to rethink identity’ With contributors from across a wide range of experiences and nationalities (we count eight), this issue argues for the importance of a multiplicity of voices, and the opportunity for those voices to contradict and complicate themselves over time In their own ways, each contributor measures the distance between their origins and the way they consider their identities today, and interrogates the idea of identity as a fixed or single state   ‘I wanted to find a place for myself,’ explains Jefferson ‘I didn’t want to come up with performances of what I was calculating and sometimes seeing as the preferred authentic stances So I had to find a legitimate space’ Annie Ernaux, in her interview with long-term fan Lauren Elkin, traces the gap between her working-class origins and her current status as one of France’s pre-eminent writers: ‘It’s very spatial, as if there were two different places that had to be brought together: the place I started from, which has a certain violence, and the world of literature In a way, every time I write, I’m conquering something’ This difference Ernaux identifies, which is the continued difficulty of accessing culture if you are from a working-class or minority background, is something we wanted to recognise through our roundtable on class Participants share the ways they came into consciousness about their own class identities, the compassion required to approach our differences, and the limits of diversity measures It’s a subject far too complex and difficult for a single session to do it justice; over the coming months we’ll continue the conversation on our website   Elsewhere, we present a wide-ranging interview with the artist Mernet Larsen, who explains the way she began to refigure her earlier work to find new stories and meanings within it, resisting the idea of the finished artwork or any single interpretation Allison Katz, too, repeatedly samples and adapts her own images, and