From the Guest-Editor

The concept of parts is a writer’s concept. We are all about piecing. And as much as we piece, and assemble, and put together, and weave, we dissect, we disassemble, we destroy, and obliterate. We cannot write without everything going to pieces and then, again, becoming whole. There is, at some point, a stasis, perhaps the type Frost referred to, maybe more than a ‘stay against confusion,’ an actual stasis within it, when we simply halt our process of building and tearing down, fragmenting and making whole, fraying to bits and reassembling—and at this moment of stasis, we find at least a moment of pause, of culmination, of finishing. Without some process of fragmentation, we cannot write or complete anything. But as writers, we cannot always be happy with completion, cannot always love its smooth form, its expected grace, its anticipated, always wanted and yet simultaneously rejected need to end. And so, we manipulate that moment. We prolong our arc. We tease out the bits and pieces and, sometimes, avoid the denouement of finale altogether. And, is there any better way to honor fragment than through sequence? The sequence reinforces, for us, the idea of bits, of an ending within and ending, and also of a beginning within a beginning…it causes us to reevaluate what we see as whole, to reappropriate our perceptions of length, to continually refashion the sweep of the narrative, the pace of the poem, so that we accommodate its collection of fits and starts. The sequential narrative or poem is equally beautiful in its task of metonymy as well as metaphor, its concern for the construct of juxtaposition, of collage, its seeming surrender to momentary failures of false closure for the greater good of the whole.

In this issue of Natural Bridge we have chosen to feature a good amount of work that falls within the theme of “Fragment and Sequence” as an homage to the bits and pieces to which we owe our literary lives. We are featuring established writers, such as Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Timothy Liu, and Rigoberto Gonzalez, as well as emerging writers like Brian Turner, 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award winner from Alice James books, and Tayari Jones, whose second novel, The Untelling (Warner Books, 2005) has just been released to rave reviews. We have also featured a number of fellows and alumni from the Caven Canem Workshop and Retreat, among them Jacqueline Jones LaMon, Ross Gay (who collaborated with fellow artist Kim Thomas on the images that grace our cover), Camille Dungy, Adrian Matejka, and Kevin Simmonds.

Like many of the writers in this issue, I was first introduced to the concept of a literary fragment which was somehow excused from its incompleteness and offered as a nexus for study when my 11th grade World Literature teacher introduced us, honestly and unabashedly, to the poetry fragments of Sappho. And how fitting that we could never get quite a good enough dose of her in that small forum because she was a figure who could hardly be pieced together herself. There was, without a doubt, something reminiscent in those fragments of Emily Dickinson who I later read and more importantly, imagined: all of her little poems folded up by those slight hands and wrapped in ribbon packages that would rest, not so finally, in her drawers. Within the scheme of her life she was never a “Completed Works of…” kind of writer. She was a poet of bits and pieces. It goes on and on, this debt to the fragment, to the lost works of Steisichorus, one of the early writers of the myth of the Aeneid, to Faulkner’s writing and rewriting the fragments of one imaginary town and its people from which we try, repeatedly, to discern some fathomable whole, to the lovely and inevitably fragmented chords of grief and light in Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

Within this issue we may find that the whole is sumptuous and delicious, that completion offers us a firm and warm grasp, but that also, to delay wholeness, to delay completion often offers another dimension to our experience as readers and writers of literary mindedness. There will be no sin committed here if you walk away a tad unfulfilled, if you wrench just a little bit from want, carry with you a parcel of need, if, also, you leave understanding that the whole, in some instances, is not always greater than the sum of its parts.

—Ruth Ellen Kocher