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From the Guest Editor Art alleviates boredom, and it does so by taking us out of ourselves and throwing us into the unfamiliar and the new, yet in the best works, that unfamiliar can turn back on itself and become recognizable as part of us, maybe that part we’ve deliberately pushed aside, or one briefly unrecognizable because seen from a different angle. Writers have always striven to “tell it slant,” as Emily instructed, and as readers we remain delighted to read it slant. How much is the slant? Well that depends on the talent and taste of the writer. In this issue of Natural Bridge, the slant comes from a political campaign for justice of the peace in which the candidate runs on a promise to be crooked, from a woman who experimented with the swinging lifestyle, from an obsessed day trader who cannot stop gambling, from a young professional woman who chooses homelessness, from a veteran of the Iraq war, from a displaced Chinese man whose identity is not important to those who love him. It comes in the form of love poems and poems of the sacred and poems of war. It comes from a translated poem in which an identity is created from a list, and from a poem about intense combustible anger. It comes from a story written as a fable and a modular story written around but not about an event. It comes from the comic mixed with sorrow. The slant version of the truth can make you laugh or cry or both, can worry, irritate, annoy, or offend you, as well as move or delight you. That is the hope of all of us who worked on this issue. From the more than one thousand submissions for this issue, all over the transom, not one piece solicited, we have accepted these 11 stories, 18 poems, and 3 translations. It goes without saying that we returned some good pieces, for we are human, and I, along with the editorial assistants, those MFA students who are advanced enough to serve as readers and editors, selected the pieces fast, but with as much care as possible. There was surprising unanimity on these, and we believe that each piece chosen for issue 19 is well-crafted and true and not boring. The editorial assistants who worked so hard on this issue are Steven Adams, O. Ayes, Julianne Bartlett, Matt Bell, Chris Candice, James Goodman, Susan LaBrier, Jamie Nelson, Andrew Pryor, Dylan Smith, Jeannita Triggs, Jaime R. Wood, and Juliette Yancey. May their own work be considered with as much intelligence and care when they submit it to other journals. —Mary Troy |
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