Winter 2016: Prose
Introduction
Whether fiction or nonfiction, a story asks us to suspend our disbelief, to make the world of the storyteller ours. If the writer tells the story well, we give ourselves over and the story returns at odd moments as we go about our usual lives.
These six pieces, three fiction, three nonfiction, capture our imagination in different ways, but they all speak to the unavoidable experience of loss and to the altered state loss creates, Joan Didion's “year of magical thinking.”
The first two tales use the altered state of magical realism to convey the depth of loss. In “Scarab Man” and “Planetary Influences,” we meet a homeless man and a kitten who provide healing magic to a grieving widow and a frightened child.
Sometimes objects are talismans of healing. In “Bone of the Past,” a quilt made many years before by the narrator for her mother brings healing after the mother's death.
The narrator in “Teachings: A Buddhist Ghost Story” has lost the teacher who helped her walk the path of dharma. As she walks her own path of grief, she receives her talisman in a final “teaching,” to inform the rest of her life.
Will the jeep in “Wrangler” take the narrator back to her “badass” self? We know she believes it will. Like the quilt, the jeep, as real as its four-wheel drive, is a talisman.
The loss in the novel excerpt “A Nicaraguan Spring” comes from the war that tore Nicaragua apart. Two very different narrators show us how hard it is “to understand stories of war in times of peace.”
We invite you to suspend your disbelief and enter the worlds of these stories. We hope they stay with you in your ordinary lives, as they did in ours.
Thea Constantine
Helen Sinoradzki
Prose Co-Editors
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Celebrating nature, home and the cycles of life – twenty poets light the winter night. |
Six stories use magic to explore loss, grief and healing. |
With imagery of flora and fauna, four artists animate the winter landscape. |
Five young women dig deep to each speak their individual truth . |
From emerging to established writers – meet the women behind our eighth issue’s voices and visions. |
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LETTER FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR
POETRY Northwest Equinox by Kris Demien Gradations of Gray by Wendy Thompson With Gladness by Sara Graves Home by Leora Marialicia González For a Grade School Classmate by Joan Maiers Canning Factory Road by Elizabeth Stoessl To Make a Prairie by Carolyn Martin At Home by Suzy Harris Family Disagreement by Tricia Knoll The Bullfrogs by Katherine Boyer Cows by Rebecca Jamieson Lesson by Stacey Vallas Stardust by Erin Iwata Perspective by Carolyn Martin Lacrosse Season by Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo The Tangled Path by Suzanne LaGrande Matched Set by Tanya Jarvik False Bus Stop by Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo Last Visit by Erin Iwata October Walk with My Mother by Ann Sinclair First Rothko Exercise by Elizabeth McLagan Fractions by Susan Blackaby Tea by Melineh Yemenidjian Return by Stacey Vallas PROSE Scarab Man by Cynthia McGean Planetary Influences by Alida Thacher Bone of the Past by Burky Achilles Teachings: A Buddhist Ghost Story by Ann Sihler Wrangler by Desiree Wright A Nicaraguan Spring by Pamela Russell Bejerano FEATURED ART Into the Wonder by Annamieka Hopps Davidson Deep Blue Meditation by Annamieka Hopps Davidson Weave Me Into the Sea by Annamieka Hopps Davidson Crassula 2 by Alison Foshee Crassula 5 by Alison Foshee Crassula 6 by Alison Foshee Warm Autumn by Tamar Hammer Girl with Conch by Tamar Hammer With Her Dog by Tamar Hammer YOUNG VOICES Love Beyond Loss by Isabel Lickey Submerged by Raimy Khalife Hamdan Which Way? by Alli Rodenbaugh To Autumn by Sara Barkouli The Storm by Elie Doubleday CONTRIBUTORS |