For our Fall 2016 issue, we initiate two new sections to our journal. The first responds to the shock and confusion many of us feel about the results of the presidential election. We believe that difficult times are ahead and wonder what we can do to harness our energy constructively.
In response, this magazine will be starting a new section next issue. For that section, we’re currently soliciting thoughtful prose or poetry that responds to the political, cultural, and social change in smart, fresh, and helpful ways. We’re a quarterly literary magazine so we are not the right forum for immediate responses to the week’s big event or the latest outrageous set of tweets. Instead, we need deeper reflections, short or long.
We’re also initiating a new section called “What We’re Reading.” The “We” in the forum’s title includes you, our readers. We hope some of you will send us short prose pieces discussing what you’re reading, maybe even how you read. Please note that you needn’t worry that you are not reading something brand new. Recent books are fine, but we are also interested to know whatever literary work is important in your reading currently. If you go back every few years and reread David Copperfield or some other book you love, good! Let’s hear about it and hear about why you love it.
In the meantime, we offer stories and poems we think you’ll enjoy. In “Your Sweet Voice Calling,” Florence Golod’s short story, her protagonist struggles with how she should react to a romance long after she imagined romance had gone out of her life. Maria Massei-Rosato’s memoir “Seesaw” recounts a situation many of us have lived, being the sandwich generation caught between aging parents and growing children. And oh for revisiting, and possibly making peace with, a painful past in Mary Driver-Thiel’s short story, “State Lines.”
With our larger-than-usual group of new poets in this issue, we were wondering what to call them. There must be some equivalent to a pride of lions or a murder of crows. A coffee house of poets? Maybe. In any case, just to start off, you might try Chet Corey’s short, smart poem, “The Windsor.” If you want to face into some of the harder changes of later life, then you’ll like how Norita Dittberner-Jax helps us appreciate letting go of things in her poems, “Going through the Boxes” and “Equipment.” There’s also poetry of love, of roadside realizations, and trying to access a lost past. Even looking back many decades, every poem is focused on where we are now, that only place we can be.
Happy reading, and Like us on Facebook,
Leonard Lang and Stephen Peters, Editors
Contents: Volume II, Number 2
Prose
Florence Golod
• Your Sweet Voice Calling
Maria Massei-Rosato
• Seesaw
Mary Driver-Thiel
• State Lines
Poetry
Chet Corey
• The Windsor
• Them There Eyes
Norita Dittberner-Jax
• Going through the Boxes
• Equipment
Terri Kirby Erickson
• Nostalgia
William Doreski
• Eagle, Eagle, Eagle
Ralph Imholte
• All Over the City
G. Timothy Gordan
• Inscription
What We’re Reading
Stephen Peters & Leonard Lang