“You live a while in two worlds at once” —Li-Young Lee

It was January. It was freezing. We were lost. It was the third day of our first week-long writing residency. The campus was not especially big or difficult to navigate, and a snow-dusted clock tower overlooked everything like a lighthouse. There were three of us. We’d just met. We stopped on the edge of campus where the flat-faced university buildings turned into restaurants, a marble synagogue, a few shells of once-beautiful homes. “Do you still know where we’re going?” someone asked. “I was following you,” we all said. Shivering, we laughed, turned around, lost ourselves again.

I’m used to getting lost; I’m not used to moving through the world with others for whom lostness is also their fundamental mode of being. It felt warmer, kinder. This type of lostness comes not from a failure to pay attention but from an attempt to pay attention to everything at once: the visible and the invisible, the material and the possible, what is and what isn’t. It’s giving attention to both the specific naked sycamore on the side of the road and the one blooming green on the edge of your imagination. It has something to do with being a storyteller, an artist. As Li-Young Lee says: “You live a while in two worlds at once.”

This issue is full of people suspended between worlds, straddling spaces, existing in two realms simultaneously.

Molly Gustafson’s “Monkey Bar Blues” situates us between childhood and adulthood, between reality and hazy memory, while her “viscera” grapples with the tensions between the physical and the metaphysical, the exuberance of coming into being and the violence of breaking what is.

In “Ants,” Jeff McLaughlin finds himself between the worlds of his two children—one of joyful play, one of aching care—and navigates how presence in one means absence in the other.

Zuzanna Dutkiewicz’s “Soil Me” slides on many levels: character slips between girl and plant; narrative drifts between dream and reality. The piece itself exists somewhere between fiction and poem in its narrative desperation to simultaneously make things happen and hold things still.

Natasha O’Hara’s speaker in “A Case of the Morbs” straddles desire and financial reality. Eric Weil’s speaker in “For Perspective on Shade and Light” encounters both the actuality of his ninety-year-old mother and the imagined memory of her younger self. Gabriel Noel’s speaker in “The Patron Saint of Taking Your Clothes Off” swerves between dying and falling in love.

Each of these pieces opens a space for paradox: a here-yet-there; a this-yet-that; a both/and. Each of these pieces lets us exist briefly “in two worlds at once.”

The process of creating this issue found us all between two worlds. From the reality of hundreds of submissions, we pulled one possible issue, one possible iteration, one combination of pieces that exist here, together, as one new beautiful thing.

Every person who worked on this magazine was, sincerely, amazing, and creating this issue was a beautiful, joyful experience.
The most gigantic thank you to Dawn Leas, for being an absolutely brilliant Editorial Advisor. Thank you, Dawn, for being our lighthouse—for being an amazing teacher and guide, for the time and genuine care you brought to every part of the magazine. Dawn designed our production schedule, reviewed (literally) everything, answered millions of questions, and kept everything organized, on-track, and running. Every day, Dawn gave me and everyone both the support to know what we were doing and the freedom to experiment and learn. I’m so grateful for your kindness, patience, and for your being a genuinely wonderful person to work with!

An enormous thank you to our fabulous genre editors: H.T. Reynolds and Tasha Saint-Louis, poetry co-editors; Sarah Lyons, fiction editor; Melanie McGehee, creative-nonfiction editor; and Terrence Dwyer, scripts editor. H.T., Tasha, Sarah, Melanie, and Terrence read every single submission in their genres, prepared the semi-finalist list, reviewed every reader’s written feedback and votes, led the editorial discussions to select the published pieces, and worked with the authors on edits. With the passion and insight they brought to the discussions, with the care and understanding they brought to the edits, they all went way above and beyond to make this issue something beautiful and special.

A giant thank you to our wonderful production staff. Thank you, Cynthia Kolanowski, for being an outstanding production advisor. Cynthia taught herself how to work in WordPress, with some help from our web designer Paul, and now has an incredible depth of experience. I’m so grateful to Cynthia for being a fabulous teacher, for her clear explanations of everything, and for always making everyone feel included. Huge thank you’s also to Jess Van Orden, our excellent production editor; to Lexie Quigley and Lois Grimm, our fantastic production assistants; to D. Nicholas Penglase, our brilliant proofreader. The production staff worked diligently to format, proofread, edit, layout, and execute all the involved back-end work that makes the journal stunning and readable. I’m so appreciative of the patience, fortitude, and attention to detail the production staff brought to every piece, especially to those pieces with complicated and intricate formatting.

Thank you to Paul Matthew Carr, our incredible web designer/master, for all the work you do with the production staff and otherwise to make and keep our website gorgeous. Thank you to Matt Hinton, our awesome photographer (and program alum, in playwriting), for all the genuinely delightful photos you took for our website.

A tremendous thank you to Lori Coughlin, my amazing social media assistant. Lori brought her exceptional creativity and wit to Canva and designed captivating social media posts for the journal every single week.

Thank you to our phenomenal readers: Rachel Brown-Rooney, Lori Coughlin, Lois Grimm, Samantha Dutcher, Cathy Earnest, Cass Heid, Ericka Macarthy, Chuck Mains, D. Nicholas Penglase, Brian Schroeder, Alexandra Thomas, Jess Van Orden. Thank you for the time and care you gave to the reading, the passion you brought to advocate for the pieces you care about and the authors whose voices you want amplified. Week after week, I learned so much from everyone’s sharply insightful comments.

Thank you to every author who submitted. We received so much powerful work this semester, far more than we could possibly publish, and the quality of the submissions made reading an absolute delight. Thank you to our authors: for letting us give your words a home—for your ongoing care and communication throughout the publication process—for writing, creating, existing in two worlds at once.

Thank you, finally, to Dr. David Hicks, director of the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University; and to Patti Naumann, the program’s administrative assistant. David and Patti give a tremendous amount of ongoing support to both the journal and the program that makes the journal possible. Both the journal and the program are unbelievably special, and I’m truly so grateful for everything you both do to make such special things exist in this world.

I hope this issue brings you, Reader, as much joy to read as it brought us to create. I hope you can, for a while, exist in two worlds at once.

Lizzy Ke Polishan
Managing Editor
River & South Review