2017 (Volume 29)
Every year we increasingly see why our mission is so important. As we live in a world of fake news, online publishing with a blink-of-an-eye shelf life, and short-short news cycles, we know our work has value. Our goal is to highlight underrepresented voices in art and literature who have something lasting to say to us and our world.
The theme of families — functional and dysfunctional — emerges in this issue. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives. In “Last Sun of Kansas” we feel the loneliness of a mother raising an alien baby. Lilly Schneider’s “Only This Simple Thing” is a coming of age story about a boy who, in his bi-weekly breakfasts with his curmudgeonly grandfather, comes to learn the deep causes of his grandfather’s bitterness. Analia Villagra in “Teresa and Camila Hate the Snow” shows two sisters who have stayed connected as they moved away from home. Jacob Thomas Berns in “Continues” reveals a depressed, divorced mother and son who bond over playing Super Nintendo. “Jamie” by Bruce Tallerman is a letter from a brother to his sister after she converts to Judaism and moves to Israel.
In our nonfiction section, Daniel Rousseau’s essay, “Retrieving Charlie Gehringer: How a Soldier Escaped the Nazis on the Back of a Tiger,” focuses on a grandson trying to understand his grandfather through the baseball cards his grandfather loved and collected. Kathleen McGuire’s “Owl Medicine’ is an essay where the narrator shares memories of her rambling, gray Victorian house as she prepares to leave it with her fourth husband. In ‘Bearings,” Carol Smith writes of her mother and her lost memory: “I can only supply her with versions of her memory, filtered through my own.”
Our poetry section includes 36 poems that deal with themes ranging from love — found and lost — to memories, to the degradation of the environment.
In our cover photo by Michael Crowley, we see shelves of books in the Trinity College Library in Dublin. What a fitting tribute to literacy. We invite you to soak in the images and words of our 29th issue and to share in this legacy of thriving literature and art. Enjoy.
C0VER: "The Stacks in Long Hall, Trinity college, Dublin, Ireland"
Michael Crowley / photograph
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Contest Winners
Fiction
"The Last Sun of Kansas"
Daniel Paul
Paul, from Cincinnati, Ohio, has had his fiction, non-fiction and humor writing appear in the New Delta Review, Puerto Del Sol and Moon City Review, among others. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Southern Illinois University, and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati.
Nonfiction
"Christmas in the Bitch's Dollhouse"
By Lisa Lanser Rose
Lanser Rose is an author from Palm Harbor, Fla. She has published a memoir, “For the Love of a Dog,” and the novel, “Body Sharers,” which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for Best First Novel. Lanser Rose is also co-director of the Other Words literary conference, the founder of The Gloria Sirens web blog, a member of the board of the Florida Literary Arts Coalition and an adjunct writing instructor at St. Petersburg (Fla.) College. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Penn State University.
Poetry
"Ianua: 19 September, 2016"
Jude Nutter
Nutter, of Minneapolis, Minn., was born in England and raised in Germany. She won the Briar Cliff Review’s poetry contest previously in 2012 with her poem, “Love like That.” Nutter is the recipient of more than 30 awards and grants, including three fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board and two McKnight Foundation Fellowships. She has published three collections, including “Pictures of the Afterlife,” “The Curator of Silence,” and “I wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman,” which was won the 2010 Minnesota Book Award in poetry and was voted Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Review.