2002 (Volume 14)

 

Change stands out as a them in this issue. Everything changes — in love, in relationships, in war, in nature, in families, and in loss.

 

In our prize-winning story "A Caveat," we feel deeply the struggle of a young woman. We feel the changes her parents have to go through to deal with the fact that their daughter loves another woman. They look for clues as to the change they should have seen coming. The father focuses on a photograph of her wearing a football helmet and wonders if that was a clue he missed. A Caveat is beautiful and moving in its witness of love and the suffering it may entail, to the lover and those around her.

 

It is coincidental that so many stories are about war, even among those submitted before September 11. Jenna Blum's "Those Who Save Us" tells the story of a woman in Germany from 1942-44 who must submit to the demands of the Obersturmfuhrer if she wishes to save herself and her daughter. Later she marries the American solder who rescued her but she can't forget the past.

 

In Dave Baker's "The Line," a government clerk stands waiting for his turn with the firing squad and notices the socks on the Russian soldier-boy's hands. He thinks that war is easier on men.

 

Marcia Poole in her essay "Thrust into Fear" looks at the author Josip Novokavich who writes stories about war in former Yugoslavia. In her interview with him, she says she wasn't looking forward to talking about war and the complex issues that it raises. Poole asks, "Where does evil come from and who gets recruited to do it?" Yet she points out that six months later, after Sept. 11, "his stories about war have profound relevance to my life. Evil no longer is abstract and faraway." War changes our lives.