To enter this warm space is to leave behind an often contentious other world that sought, as we edited this issue, to focus all of our attention on the price of gasoline. Walking into the office is to experience an arena where readers and writers will feel most at home—that place where what is most important is what has been considered and then written down. When I was a child, my father worked as an editor and journalist and I recall occasions when I visited him at his office: it was also a rather confined space where the typewriters clacked and banged out a ferocious but compelling music that would ring in my head for days afterwards. I remember too the noisier and quite frenetic printing machines, the enormous reams of paper in an outside room, and standing behind the typesetters and compositors as they worked their rare magic with tools, materials, and hands. Those childhood visits provided me with precious insights into the editing and production processes that I have not forgotten. Even though the technology has changed from those days, journals are still edited by people, and still require the human touch.

To work on Natural Bridge as a guest editor, for the third time, is, for me, an opportunity to be an adult reader and, simultaneously, the child who wanders again through the offices and among the presses of the old People Newspaper office on Main St. in Wexford mesmerized by all I saw and heard. Those offices, though larger, were modest too and fittingly so because the practical needs of the writer and editor are themselves quite modest. These tight rooms will steel the individual to the writer’s or editor’s task, and keep distraction at bay. We are not concerned with the fittings but with the work itself. And much of the work submitted for this issue of Natural Bridge was very fine indeed. Throughout the process, we were challenged as readers, and reminded of the wonderful diversity of American literary imagination.

Through the four month reading period, we read aloud to one another in class, deliberated at home alone, and spent many hours discussing the many merits of the submissions we received—the stories, poems, essays, and translations. We are grateful to all of the authors who submitted work for this issue and encourage you to do so again. Your work is highly-valued and read seriously by our staff.

If you are looking for the Natural Bridge office on the campus of the University of Missouri-St. Louis and driving northward on Interstate 170, you will hardly go astray—you will see a sign for the university and another for Natural Bridge Road, and understand that they are inseparable. By the time you exit 170, you will have learned that the journal takes its name from the road that bisects our campus. It is a reminder that literature is tied to place, that the author has been formed as much by the place he/she has emerged from as by family, education, and the practice of writing. Much of the work we read for this issue is defined by the author’s relationship to his/her place of origin, whether the relationship was positive, negative, or, more often than not, tangled.

Natural Bridge is the literary journal of the University of Missouri-St. Louis MFA program. Each issue is compiled by a guest editor and jury of astute graduate students from our writing program. These students are listed as Editorial Assistants on the masthead of this issue, but they worked largely as equals and with great dedication and generosity.

—Eamonn Wall