Volume 28, Issue 2 (2015)

Letter from the Editor

In my four years with A Midwestern Review, the first three were characterized by a certain trend—that fiction, in sheer volume of submissions, always outstripped nonfiction by a considerable margin.

But this year, nonfiction submissions scorched the roof of our digital submission manager, while fiction submissions dwindled to numbers that could be counted on one hand. I've spent the entire academic year ruminating over this phenomenon, and though Pm no closer to understanding it than I was at the start, Pm uplifted by what it signifies.

In this year’s submissions, we’ve seen memoiristic nonfiction rooted in source material spanning semesters abroad, embittered relationships, lost weekends. We’ve seen this same spirit of experiential realism across genres and mediums—some of our artworks represent true-life travels, some of our poetry calls out to genuine places and faces, and even our most fantastical fiction gestures at truths as elemental as the way in which cream mellows coffee. These works are so shot through with tendrils of authentic encounters that I've begun to wonder if the fictive dream is simply that—a dream that fiction is fictional, when in reality it’s an imaginative architecture of emotional truth constructed around seeds of experiential truth.

Joan Didion once wrote, “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from himself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”

This is what our contributors are doing—living richly and fully in the world, living there with intention, and cataloguing the experience as they do. Documenting those experiences is the literary equivalent of planting a flag on the moon, and those flags bear our contributors’ bylines with declarative pride.

Didion’s reference to the tendency of the writer to “remake” this beloved subject “in his own image” isn’t an indication of narcissism, but rather a nod to what Mary Gaitskill discussed with me in our centerfold: the inimitable perception that each and every writer harbors, that thing that makes him unique to all others. Our contributors have shaped themselves and been shaped to give voice to their own experience of the world, and those voices are memorable.

I thank our contributors—for the courage it took to live these stories, and the courage it took to write them down. Keep planting flags, keep putting your name on them, and keep sending them our way.