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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.

Art

 

Abiquiu, New Mexico
Jordan Lienhoop

 

Absence of Memor
Jordan Lienhoop

 

Dog-Manual
Emma Baldwin

 

Genesis
Pui Yee (Yupee) Yiu

 

Lineage
Pui Yee (Yupee) Yiu

 

More than a Game
Jake A. Miller

 

September 24. 2014
Taylor Zartman

Feature

 

A Conversation With Mary Gaitskill
Adrienne Westenfeld

Fiction

 

Ann Marie
Emma Haynes

 

Offensive
Hope Jordan

Non-Fiction

 

Kiss With a Fist
Adrienne Westenfeld

 

Millcreek
Hannah Bradley

 

Questioning The Pope
Jim Easterhouse

Poetry

 

Blue Girls
Jordan Lienhoop

 

Bowling
Brian Austin

 

Orbiting
Mary Ardery

 

Plum Undone
Zach Manges

Editors

Editor-in-Chief
Adrienne Westenfeld
Design Editor
Thuy Anh Nguyen
Design Staff
Jordan Lienhoop
Faculty Advisor
David Crouse
Fiction Editor
Zach Manges
Fiction Writing Staff
Hannah Bradley
Kaitlin Emmert
Mallory Hasty
Emma Haynes
Annie Locke
Holly Whistler
Nonfiction Editor
Kaitlyn Koby
Nonfiction Writing Staff
Cory Hall
Emily Hancock
Leeann Sausser
Chenlu Xue
Poetry Editor
Hayden DeBruler
Poetry Writing Staff
Hattie Blair
Andrey Bobrovskiy
Emily Fox
Tiaxin Su
Art Editor
Taylor Zartman
Art Staff
Jordan Lienhoop
Ia Tserodze