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From the Guest Editor From high summer in St. Louis, through a warm fall, and into the mild beginnings of winter, we read, discussed, and marveled at the quality and variety of submissions. Natural Bridge operates with two submission periods—July/August and November/December—and our task was to mold an issue from work submitted during the summer period. Our special focus is contemporary Irish and Irish-American writing, and this accounts for about half of the current issue, though such is the energy present in all of the work that the boundaries can quickly become transparent. The best writing is simultaneously local and universal. For the Irish and Irish-American section, little work was solicited. Recently, The Southern Review and TriQuarterly have produced brilliant synopses of the contemporary Irish literary scene in their special Irish issues, and we felt that there was little we could add to these narratives. Instead, we relied on the calls for work which we placed in Poets & Writers and The Writer’s Chronicle to draw poets, fiction writers, and essayists to Natural Bridge. We took this route as we were certain that there were many writers out there who were early in their careers, who were not likely to be asked to submit to solicited issues of journals, and who represent the future of Irish and Irish-American writing. For this section, we received submissions from all over the world and believe that the selection we have made is cutting-edge, quirky, and much of it the work of younger writers from whom we will hear more in the future. Alongside these younger writers, we are delighted to place the work of writers who have already left a significant mark on the Irish and Irish-American scenes: X.J. Kennedy, Greg Delanty, James Liddy, Susan Firer, and Michael Coady. From the quality of the submissions, we have borne witness to the continued vitality that=s present in the Irish community—from Minnesota to Melbourne to Carrick-on-Suir. Clearly, the Irish experience of diaspora is complex. One of the drawbacks associated with the work of the writer and scholar is that, invariably, he/she works alone. Over the years, I have often cast a jealous glance in the direction of playwrights, musicians, and dancers because I have envied the amount of collaboration their work requires. I have longed for the type of productive negotiation that=s part of the process of getting a play from the page to the stage, and I have long desired to be among musicians as they assemble songs from disparate sources. The experience of editing this issue of Natural Bridge was such a pleasure because it afforded me four months of intense collaboration. After the staff and I had come to know one another and established a group dynamic and a sense of purpose, we developed, I felt, a fluid sense of editorship. Our discussions were often driven by that member of our staff who most believed in the merits of the story, poem, or essay at hand. For my part, I was guided by my knowledge of the workings of the European Union: I understood that if the leaders of such disparate nations as France, Germany, Italy, and Great Britain could reach consensus, then so could we. And we did. At the end, all of us were delighted and proud of the work we selected. We had all played a full part. We had a sense of individual and communal ownership. A special word of thanks to David Carkeet, the continuing editor of Natural Bridge. Throughout the process of preparing this issue, he has been unfailingly helpful: he has offered sound advice and been free with his time. Ryan Stone, in addition to his work as an assistant editor, has been responsible for much of the day-to-day work. It is as a result of his organizational skills that we have been able to keep on track. A literary journal like ours is a manifestation of mature reflection on the diverse world in which we live. It is a representation of the best that the human spirit offers in our time. It seeks to bring into play on the page many-sided lives. It celebrates the very fact of being alive in our time. We read and discussed submissions under the deep shadows cast by the horrific events of September 11. For my part, I reflected often on the hot and sticky summer days, when our family lived in New York, when I brought my young children to the World Trade Center to play, eat a picnic lunch, and shelter from the yellow air of the city. Also, I remembered the many nights I was driven home from work by two of my students, one a police officer, the other a firefighter, in acts of kindness that took them miles out of their way on their own journeys home to their families. As a staff, we shared an intense belief in the importance of the word, a sense which was heightened as we witnessed the devastation which was taking place around us. Writing is about remembering and remembering is not forgetting. —Eamonn Wall
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