When people think about traveling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, ‘gosh,
I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.’ But in the present we mow our lawns
and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time…Nobody thinks of now as the future past.
—Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

1

I was not planning to get an MFA. I was planning to get a beer.

My friend Peter had just told me about a cool writing group at a brewery. Get a beer and bang out a poem? Amazing. 10/10.

2

The writing group is magical and run by David Hicks. It’s in a former garage. When it’s nice outside, the bartenders roll up the garage doors, and you can smell the trees. I won’t pretend I know what kind of trees, but they smell like the late-May afternoon when second grade turns into endless syrupy light and days without homework or regular circadian rhythms. The beer flavors constantly renew, and their names appear on mini chalkboards over the bar. Someone brings snacks. David brings a prompt. Abe Lincoln smiles, in repeated motifs, from wallpaper on an accent wall.

That day, I think the doors were open. For the purposes of this essay, they were, and everything still smelled like possibilities and trees. There was a Tupperware of cookies, freshly baked. In my memory, the cookies are matcha. I have been informed, by the maker of the cookies, that he has never made matcha cookies in his life. I met, for the first time, David. I probably finished my poem. I definitely got my beer. I would, definitely, come back.

It was the next time, or maybe an email just after, when David, who is also the director of the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes, said, Do you want an MFA?

3

Robert Browning, David explained, in his most recent writing prompt, had a theory that our lives abound with infinite moments. Most people meet these infinite moments and walk on by because they’re afraid. But sometimes, we do grab one, and they lead to “outrageous fortune.” When Robert Browning met Elizabeth Barrett, that was an infinite moment, grabbed.

The Prompt: Put your characters in an infinite moment. Then suspend it. Go to setting. Go to a fantasy. “Suspend the fuck out of that moment and see whether the character will grab it or not.”

4

Did I want an MFA?

No.

I’d tried that, once upon a time, dropped out. I had student loans from my single semester and a general wariness toward the whole MFA thing. Plus, a tiny part of me got an embarrassing amount of joy from listing “MFA-dropout” in my author bio when I published poems in a lit mag that rejected my MFA-finishing friends.

But.

I wanted to write a novel. And I wanted writing friends. Once I had so many writing friends. Now I was spending a lot of time wandering the forest, bouncing poem ideas off trees. I love trees. There is only so much you can talk to trees.

5

This issue of River & South abounds with authors confronting time.

“I am tired of converting your body into the past tense” writes Annalisa Hansford in her poem “July 27, 2020.”

“In the memory the boy is exhausted, / held by the throat like a gathering / of wildflowers,” writes John Pring in “Permanence.”

In Ellen Boomer’s “Turas,” she writes: “I reached into my coat pocket and crinkled the empty candy wrapper, wondering how she’ll balance the weight of living in both the past and present tenses.”

6

I said, Maybe!, and met David at a coffee shop.

There was something genuine about David. When he talked about the program, he radiated excitement. When he talked about the writing process, he talked about writing like both real labor and a totally magical experience, which, to me, checked out. When he talked about writers, it felt caring and sincere.

We talked about the program’s magazine, River & South. A mag lives on the edge of the lonely part of writing. The part where it gets less lonely.

Maybe.

It was almost Thanksgiving. The deadline to apply was really close. I had, like, two days to decide.

7

Christie Buckovecky’s poem “Acid Wash,” which is dedicated “to our past selves” features a gorgeous image of “stones bleaching the girl / I thought I was.”

Haley King writes, in “In Motion/Processing,”: “I’ve seen ships disappear / into sea; clouds turn to sun, making new light, making new / shapes, making new.”

8

A month later, I was on campus with a caramel iced coffee, in a room with the fifteen new members of my cohort. There were spinning chairs and glass walls. The room was a snow globe with slow-falling snow, falling slowly onto the street. Everyone was a stranger, but kind of not a stranger. Everyone in this room had, in some shape or form, encountered an infinite moment and said yes.

Many of these infinite moments traced back to David. An encounter with him at a book fair at a magical bookstore. Co-involvement in community writing event. A fiction workshop he ran.

9

That was our first Residency. Residency happens twice per year. It’s a full week where everyone gathers in person to write and attend class, readings, and events. The thing about Residency is that it’s always over slightly too soon, but there will be another one soon. It’s microdosing impermanence. It’s gone, but just for now. You just have to wait a few months.

Part of what makes Residency special is this coalescing of people. There’s all these ordinary moments made special in its transience. You meet your friends for lunch. You run into a professor you love and have a fabulous conversation in the elevator. Someone reads an amazing short story at the open mic, and suddenly you’re getting dinner and becoming best friends. It’s these tiny moments, all day, and there’s so many of them. And David is always right there, popping in and out of the rooms.

10

Once upon a time, I lived in a house at the top of a very steep hill. Halfway up, there was either a hump or a dip. A place where the road changed. When anyone drove over it, I’d fly into the air. My belly got this roller-coaster feeling I loved. I’d shriek delightedly. “Again, again!”

Sometimes my mom would backtrack to hit the bump again. Usually we just went home. But that was fine. Again was tomorrow. Again was still possible.

*

Then one day, it just…didn’t happen.

Maybe they fixed the road. Maybe I got a new car seat or too big to fly into the air.

Again is still possible until it’s not.

11

“Once I tied feathers to my arms with / shoelaces and threadbare hope. Stood in the / backyard like a scarecrow auditioning / for mercy,” writes Stefanie Lee, in “Praying for Wings.”

Wheeler Light writes, in “Visiting”: “The flight was unremarkable, just like the future is until it’s gone.”

12

David. Email. April 21. I’m writing to let you know I will be retiring on August 31.

13

At the end of our first semester, we have to pick a mentor for our thesis. I was completely torn between poetry and fiction, and David listened to me panic-ramble about this for…a while. “It sounds like you’re saying…” he said, and proceeded to say back what I’d been saying, only astronomically clearer—line-edited and distilled. David says he just listened while I worked it out, and that’s true in the sense that he didn’t tell me what to do. But he also listened enough to hear what I actually meant under the endless and anxious word circles. I ended up with, truly, the best possible mentor imaginable.

*

David has a thing about literary citizenship. He sincerely encourages us to show up for other writers, to support each other’s work—be involved in magazines, write reviews, show up to events, etc. I run into David and his wife Cynthia at a million literary events all semester. Events for big authors, but also for the people my cohort—their readings, launches, plays.

*

Once I was running late to a Residency class that David was sitting in on. He called to ask if I knew where I was going. I didn’t. He waited by the front door, waving cheerfully, and showed me where I was supposed to be.

*

David is David, and we’re going to miss him so much.

14

Wheeler Light writes in “Visiting”:“The issue with forgetting is not that the past is gone, but rather we lose the present.”

*

The past is gone. It’s also not gone. The past creates the present. The present is a gift from the past.

You say yes to the infinite moment. And that’s the big Yes. But then there’s everything that happens after—the way every day reverbs with tiny present-tense gifts.

15

As I’m writing this, I’m running late for dinner with a woman who is now one of my best friends—the dinner will very likely last three hours and involve sharing a tika masala pizza and thoughts on writing.

As I’m writing this, one of my very best friends texted me. I laughed so hard my cat fell off my bed—and I remember a moment a few months ago, right after we met at Residency, when we realized we both underlined the same quote in Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, and discussed it excitedly on the phone.

The quote lives rent-free in my brain and is this letter’s epigraph.

As I’m writing this, I have a completed novel that I genuinely love on my desktop. I have dinner plans with my mentor, an amazing person and bestselling author. I have, in my email inbox, two novels from new friends I can’t wait to read. I have a text, from this magazine’s phenomenal advisor, to whom I lamented my struggles in writing this. It’s the most supportive and Yoda-esque message: “Often times the writing we fight with becomes the most beautiful/magical.”

16

David is remarkably good at bringing people together. It all feels genuine and organic, somehow both spontaneous and fated. It’s like he brings the people, makes the space, and then lets whatever happens happen.

David is David, but David is also the space between the people. He lives in that space. Present in presence, and present in absence, in not just the future pasts but the future presents, the renewing gifts.

///

Thank you to everyone who made this issue possible.

Our brilliant contributors: it’s a pleasure and honor to showcase your work.

Our readers: Deja Grissom, Cass Heid, Amanda Madison, Ellen Major, Melanie McGehee, Adam Seiwell, Cari Tellis, Jessica Van Orden. Thank you for your astute comments, both in Submittable and in our editorial meetings.

Our social media assistants, Kenna DeValor and Lois Grimm. Thank you for your hilariousness, your wit, and your social media skills.

Our genre editors. Creative Nonfiction: Lori Green and Audre Ashley Arnett. Fiction: Vito Balice, Ciahnan Darrell, and Sarah Lyons. Poetry: H.T. Reynolds, Krystin Williams, and Moxxy Rogers. Scripts: Murryn Payne. Thank you for the hard work you do—from reading, to working with the authors, to leading your editorial meetings.

Tasha Saint-Louis, our submissions coordinator. Thank you for your endless Submittable knowledge, your organization, and the million things you do to smooth the submission process.

Our production team. Jess Van Orden, our production editor. Lois Grimm, our production assistant. D. Nicholas Penglase, our proofreader. Cynthia Kolanowski, our production advisor. Paul Matthew Carr, our website designer. Thank you so much for keeping our website running behind the scenes, making it aesthetically beautiful, and bringing each issue to life.

Dawn Leas, our editorial advisor. Thank you for your patience, kindness, brilliance, and for being a constantly calming and shining guiding force to this magazine and us all!

David Hicks, the director of the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing, and Patti Naumann, the program’s administrative assistant. David and Patti are both retiring this semester; it’s been such an absolute joy to know both of you and to be a part of the program while you’re both here. You both bring such a high level of positivity and make this community feel like such a gift to belong to. Thank you both for everything you do to make the program and magazine possible.

With electric warmth and technicolor love,
Lizzy Ke Polishan
Managing Editor
River & South Review