|
||
|
Editors' Advertisements This important twentieth issue of Natural Bridge invited work on a special theme: the literature of place. We’re pleased with how well the work we received on that theme captured a particular aspect of contemporary writing. And we received work, as always, of general interest and high caliber. In honor of the adventure you’ll find in these pages, we provide a few brief highlights to entice readers to travel with us. “I’ve stood by the Salton Sea and found it very weird, unforgettably so. But in Kat Meade’s Salton Sea, Dreamscape, I’ve returned to a place I expected never to see again, a place where Sonny Bono water-skied and the ghosts of failed real estate schemes still haunt the unforgiving landscape of California’s largest lake, an inland sea saltier than the Pacific ocean, where the beach is composed not of sand but the bleached bones of birds and fish.”—Steven Schreiner “With its evocative second-person narrative, Tom Whalen’s German Female, 27 takes readers to the physical location of Stuttgart-West and tries to help a woman find her individual place in a society: where she fits on the social pie-chart with other German women in terms of her attic apartment, the ratio of books she buys to books she finishes reading, the masters thesis that she wrote whose title she can never remember, and the man with whom she is supposed to settle down, but has yet to meet.” —Kenny Squires “Days are as Grass uses multiple perspectives to examine a particular and symbolic place in time: a halcyon, Fourth-of-July Sunday, in a northeastern river town. The town’s inhabitants—a firework showman, a troubled priest, a nature-attuned mother, and a child who senses the weight of adulthood without understanding it—all contribute to the underlying gravity of the story as it considers how the bright clarity of “being there” slowly fades away.” —Julianne Bartlett “Rebecca Ellis’ The Reverend Robert Walker attracted me right away with its reference to a painting that although I knew it, had never sparked any poetry of my own. Ellis’ smooth lines and simple, elegant wording give more life to the Reverend than the painter has, in many respects. The reader might find that after having read Ellis’ beautiful description of the frozen loch and its holy skater that the painting might disappoint.” —Kimberly Cowan “Queenie Beany: This piece moves; it builds. In the end, I’m not sure with whom I sympathize more, Queenie or Marge, but I do know we all need a witness. Last Supper: I’m drawn to the incredibly rich imagery, but more to the duality at work; the control and excess, the compassionate executioner. After Baika: Reading this piece leaves me off-kilter, breathless and confused. It is the poet’s intent, I think, blurring the continuum of place and time.” —Kim Selig “In reading The End of the World, I was struck by Melvin Sterne’s ability to compress a novel’s worth of ideas and narrative into a short story. Set against a beautiful though stark backdrop of India, readers accompany a sometimes ambiguous father on his journey to retrieve his dead son’s bones. The journey causes Walt to not only examine his relationship with his dead son, but also his own life and his place within the larger world. The success of this story, however, rests on its ability to cause readers to do the same.” —Jennifer Nord “Jenny Hanning’s Chicken is haunting, leaving me with a head full of confused fairy tales and dark nursery rhymes, running together full force without pauses or breaths. Rynn Williams’ Rats continues to stick in my memory. While ‘a duck’s quack won’t echo’, this poem does, with all of its internal thoughts that we all share but never talk about.” —Corinne Carter “Garth Hallberg’s moving story, Just Wide of the Moon, will strike readers with the stark honesty of one family’s attempts, and sometimes denials, to reconstruct their lives after the suicide of their oldest brother and son. The story is narrated with the deft and insightful voice of the second brother, the middle child, who struggles to find a new place within the family without losing what remains of the past. A strong, heartfelt story about love, broaching familial distance, and the endurance to survive through the darkest of journeys.” —Eileen Ryan Ewen ”In Grief Marginalia, Francis Davis gives a smart, funny treatment to a subject that, with another writer, might feel heavy-handed. In its narration we find all the true, complex emotions of a family tragedy—confusion, guilt, anger, regret and, finally, reconciliation with the dead.” —Elizabeth McConaghy
|
||
