John Cheever once said that “So long as we are possessed by experience that is distinguished by its intensity and its episodic nature, we will have the short story in our literature.” Suggesting the larger life context of those intense episodes, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts, is part of the art of the short story writer. We offer two pieces of fiction that, in very different ways, achieve that in this issue. Mark Halpern’s beautifully constructed “My Irritating Neighbor,” a story we chuckled over from the start, paints us a middle-class ex-pat successfully negotiating the deep waters of marital uncertainty and Japanese culture. Brian Bartels’ “We’ve Heard So Much About You” is an oblique picture of life on the edge that reads much of the way through like poetry. We don’t know many “facts” about the characters, not even their names, but we feel the emotional and physical landscape of their lives.
Experiences distinguished by intensity are poetry’s province as well as the short story’s. In this issue, these moments show up around family relations at a California beach when a parent turns from the center of life to vulnerable human in Marianne Zarzana’s poem, when an aging mother misremembers a son’s name in Walter Bargen’s poems, and when a child opens a present in Nina Bennet’s work. Yet poetry is not limited to clear cut narratives and incidents, let alone poems about family, and we see that in the odd moments and fresh images of Leslie Philibert’s three short poems. Overall, there’s much to enjoy as we showcase 10 poets this issue, including three who you can read in past issues of this magazine as well–Chet Corey, William Doreski, and Gayle Newby–who we are glad continue to contribute to BoomerLitMag’s literary community.
Happy reading! Like us on Facebook and for more about us, go to BoomerLit.
Leonard Lang and Stephen Peters, Editors