Featured among this issue’s essays, Jessica McCaughey’s “Aligning the Internal Compass” delves into the mysteries of why some of us are adept at finding our way in this world while others struggle to get from here to there—with or without a map. This piece echoes themes and variations in the other essays and stories here: making our way across unfamiliar territory, getting lost, losing things, losing ourselves, and finding our way again. In both Mary Medlin’s “Not Now but Soon” and Victoria Sprow-Kelly’s “All the Ways We Say Goodbye,” characters navigate the landscape of grief, and in Erin Flanagan’s “Dog People,” a woman tries to find her bearings in her role as a new mother. Nancy McCabe’s essay “The Art of Losing” explores the anguish of losing something treasured and the exhilaration of finding it again. Contributing editor Steven Church writes about the disorientation of returning to a place so well known to him and now rendered unrecognizable by a devastating tornado in “After the Storm.” And in “René,” Anne McDuffie revisits a year in Spain when she traveled, and sometimes stumbled, into the new terrains of adulthood, romance, and foreign culture.
Welcome to the new issue; we hope you lose yourself in the fine stories, essays, poems, and book reviews.
— Stephanie G’Schwind
Featured in This Issue
Annie Boutelle, Steven Church, Joe Collins, Jon Cotner, Dana Curtis, Katherine Factor, Andy Fitch, Erin Flanagan, Ryan Flaherty, Joshua Harmon, Richard Hoffman, Mark Irwin, Joshua Kryah, Joseph Lease, Laurence Lieberman, Rebecca Lindenberg, Nancy McCabe, Jessica McCaughey, Anne McDuffie, Kevin McLellan, Mary Medlin, Jenny Mueller, Edward Nobles, Kelli Anne Noftle, Julie Sophia Paegle, John Poch, Deborah Poe, Jack Ridl, Mary Ann Samyn, Victoria Sprow Kelly, Adam Strauss, Sean Tribe, Lee Upton, Liz Waldner, G. C. Waldrep, Eric Weinstein, Mande Zecca, Harriet Zinnes
