“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” –Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Before graduate school, I had never heard of Joan Didion. In all the literature I had consumed up until a few years ago, she never once made an appearance, but once she did, she stayed with me. 

It is more than just the power of her prose and the strategic way she uses memory as the guide to understanding herself in the human experience. Instead, it is the way she examines life through this idea of the ordinary instant.

When I read that line in The Year of Magical Thinking, I was struck not as much by the words themselves but by what they really meant. Everything is ordinary until it isn’t. While this memoir discusses the nature of life and death and motherhood in a series of braided storylines all circling around the untimely death of her husband, I feel that the sentiment of ordinary instants is applicable not only to my own writing journey at Wilkes but also to this issue of River & South Review.

For the past two semesters pursuing my MFA, I’ve been exploring the relationship between narrative voice and individual character voices. How might the two types of voices be working together and through each other to create a symphony of voices that harmonize within a greater melody? All of this research filtered into my current MFA manuscript tentatively titled Impressions, which follows a 16-year-old protagonist and a young female teacher protagonist through alternating narratives about the death of a former student and a premeditated murder plot that unfolds before the reader’s eyes with accompanying waves of paranoia. Inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, my modern reimagining aims to discuss the timely issues of TikTok influences, the current mental health crisis, and what it means to fight for the truth no one else wants to acknowledge.

To draft this manuscript, I had to find ways to explore the ordinary instant. How and why do tides shift? What causes one to act in particular ways? What makes something simple seem profound enough to change the course of someone’s life entirely?

To answer these questions, I looked around me. I used my own life and world to inspire and inform my writing. I especially drew from my current practicum teaching a semester-long creative writing class to a group of students in grades 10 through 12 for guidance. And what I found kept my pen cruising across the page and my fingers dancing across the keys. 

Everything I saw or read or heard seemed ordinary. However, when examined with a closer eye, the profound nature of how those instants could alter a life path jumped before me. That was the key to my manuscript, and I’ve been mining those moments ever since to construct a world unfortunately believable. 

More importantly, however, is how I found myself revisiting this idea of the ordinary during genre discussions for the Winter 2025 Issue. What struck us as editors was that the pieces readers gravitated toward explored the beauty of the mundane. How could something so seemingly insignificant, so ordinary appeal to a broader audience? 

The answer was simple: ordinary instants. Our lives are shaped by the smallest shifts in the grand scheme of things. Everything tragic can be boiled down to an instant, the moment one’s world tilts on its axis. What we noticed in each discussion was this same idea: there is beauty everywhere, and when writers highlight those moments, they hook a reader and keep them wanting more.

Kevin LeMaster’s poem “Cheerios on a Sunday” captures an ordinary scene that tugs the reader through the emotional weight of the speaker’s life. Linda Frith’s poem “How to Survive a Break-Up” uses tongue-in-cheek humor to paint the relatability of a break-up through a series of vivid images. Madison Britt’s creative nonfiction piece titled “Of Birth” takes the reader through the birth of puppies to explore the depth of holding life in one’s hands. Kyra Brendenhof’s “Unearthing” begins with a pair of muddied shoes and quickly transitions into a commentary on grief and the ways that death can tear people apart or eventually bring them back together again. 

What each discussion and each piece taught me this semester in my role as managing editor is that life truly does change in an instant. Not in the cliché way, either. In very real, very raw ways that alter not just the writer, but the reader. Every piece in this issue reminds me why I write, why I teach, and why I share my own stories, because there is beauty in the smallest, most insignificant places. But those are often the moments that have the greatest impact. 

Someone who has had an impact on me the past four semesters with River & South Review is Dawn Leas, our editorial advisor. She has allowed me to put my organizational teacher skills to good use in managing this issue, and I am grateful for her trust to lead meetings, communicate with writers, and navigate our entire team through the reading and voting process.

What was especially fruitful about the reading and voting process for the Winter 2025 Issue was seeing scripts in our submission pool for the first time. Our editors and readers worked hard to promote this addition to River & South Review, to read each script with a critical eye, and to discuss which scripts could potentially set the tone for future issues. While we did not publish any in this issue, we look forward to future script submissions.

Our editors read every single piece in their genre and facilitated discussions that led to the incredible poetry and prose in this issue. Thank you to H.T. Reynolds and Tasha Saint-Louis, poetry co-editors; Sarah Lyons, fiction editor;  Melanie McGehee, creative nonfiction editor; and Terrence Dwyer, scripts editor. 

Thank you Cynthia Kolanowski for your patience and attention to detail as our production editor and our two production assistants, Lexie Quigley and Rachel Brown-Rooney; thank you to D. Nicholas Penglase for being a diligent proofreader; and thank you to Jess Van Orden, Elizabeth Cunningham, and Sarah Yantiss for designing amazing social media content.

Our group of readers–Rachel Brown-Rooney, Lori Coughlin, Greg Dutcher, Samantha Dutcher, Cathy Earnest, Cass Heid, Ericka Macarthy, Chuck Mains, D. Nicholas Penglase, Chlorissa Prothro, John Roberts, Brian Schroeder, Jess Van Orden, Alicia Williamson, and Sarah Yantiss–thank you for the time you put into River & South, the quality of commentary during voting and discussions, and for balancing this role on top of your MA and MFA coursework and other life responsibilities. 

Finally, I would like to thank the director of the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University, Dr. David Hicks, as well as Patti Naumann, the program’s administrative assistant, for all of the support they give to the team and the journal. 

It has been a privilege to work for River & South Review as the managing editor for the past two semesters, and I hope you each live in the ordinary instants, find the beauty in the mundane, and let those moments inform your writing. Hopefully, you see the beauty of those ordinary instants in this Winter 2025 Issue. 

 

Alexandra Thomas
Managing Editor
River & South Review