It seems fitting that, as we enter our fortieth volume year (we are really fifty-seven, having been launched in 1956, but who’s counting?), the stories and essays featured in this issue are all situated in youth. For the narrator of Thomas Cain’s “Stop,” an abandoned house serves as the locus of adolescent uncertainty, romantic experimentation, testing of friendship, and loss of innocence. In Laura Schadler’s “Reward for Bravery,” a young woman recalls the sultry California summer that will forever twine together her sexual awakening and the tragic bravado of the young surfers whose attention she desired. Amid the waning days of the Vietnam War and the televised Watergate hearings, a girl experiences the pain of shifting alliances between the sexes in Marta Rose’s “Trespasses.” In her essay “Resort Home,” Amy Bernhard writes about her mother’s attempt, post-divorce, to create the life she’d imagined for herself as a young woman.  Yelizaveta Renfro’s “Navel Country” is a memoir of both her California childhood—alternately idyllic and troubled—and the state’s citrus industry, of which her larger-than-life grandfather was a pioneer. And in “Blank Slate,” Silas Hansen examines his difficult relationship with the name his parents chose for him when he was born.

Welcome to the spring issue—dive in and become young again.

Featured in this Issue:

• Laura Schadler, "Reward for Bravery" (Fiction)
• Silas Hansen, "Blank Slate" (Nonfiction)
• Laurie Blauner, "Still Life with Nervous Animals" (Poetry)
• Gary Clark, "Somewhere in Maine an Old Dream Staggers On" (Poetry)
• Analucia daSilva, "Children Dug Out of a Parsley Bed" (Poetry)