Letter from the Editor

Dear Reader,

While still riding the high from AWP, I got on a plane to Patagonia. From the cacophony of the AWP bookfair, I travelled south for 36 hours through progressively smaller airports until I reached the silence of a remote desert over 6,000 miles away. 

Though I was farther from home than I’d ever been before, I found that the landscape looked jarringly familiar. The rolling, scrubby desert, the barbed-wire fences, the endless gravel roads, the pearly blue lakes, the tall, craggy, snow capped mountains on the horizon—all of these looked just like where I grew up in Northern Nevada. If you showed me a photo of this place and told me it was a stretch of 395 south of Carson City, I might believe you. 

Yet, driving south on the Ruta del Fin del Mundo, I also felt the peculiar sensation that I was off the map. I felt closer to the edge of the world than I had ever been. The wildlife was weird. There were guanacos—enormous, wild, llama-like creatures—instead of deer. The rabbits were too big. The stars were brighter, and Orion was upside down. The place was new and exciting, but connected to home by certain fundamental physical truths. Clouds everywhere drop their water as they climb the mountains. 

I’ve spoken a lot in my letters about the connective quality of the written word. When I read a work of literature, I’m really looking for two things: the satisfaction of the feeling that this writer really gets it, and the thrill of being taken somewhere (intellectually or emotionally) that I’ve never been to before. There’s nothing like the burgeoning excitement of reading a perfect line and thinking, Yes, that’s it, that’s the feeling. Much like driving into a desert far from home, I want the landscape to be both new and spiritually familiar. The writer has to understand something that I understand and then say, but what about this. 

Each of the pieces in this issue offers uncharted territory to explore. In “Mountainbricking,” nonfiction writer Louis Dufresne offers a thoughtful exploration of the value of memory with good humor and wit. In “Lobster Day,” fiction writer Jamie Hennick throws two women together in a way that is unexpected but healing to both. And in “Air Base as Steven Seagal Action Scene [3],” poet Ryan Clark delivers a scene of sensory violence that feels particularly relevant today. All of these pieces contain threads of feeling that remind me of my own experience, and all take me to places I’ve never encountered before. I hope they’ll do the same for you. Happy exploring.

Warmly,

Aspen Kidd

Editor-in-Chief