Editor's Note
The world is changing fast – faster than our time of reaction – and we haven’t a clue where it is heading. “In No Particular Mood”, the title of this year’s Lit/Pub magazine, suggests a multitude of conflicting emotions. A restlessness is gathering under the surface even as it struggles to gain a sense of direction. Many of the characters in this year’s stories – both real and fictional – are the products of that energy.
Winnie Kelley revisits an old friendship in the poignant sketch set in Joshua Tree that opens our prose section.
Whitney Matteo tries to figure out why she dyed her hair blond and red and black before going back to brown, her natural color.
Keagan Mayes tells us what it feels like to be left behind as his peers get married and have kids.
And in a heart-breaking counterpoint to these stories, Olivia Mathis talks to Nick, 23, who has gone to jail eleven times and is stuck in a detention center thirty minutes from his hometown, Spartanburg, South Carolina.
In the fiction section, Lucia Guerrieri’s honeymooners, Chris and Joan, part ways – or maybe not - on a beach in Bermuda.
In his touching story – “Tuna” - Arwen Buoni brings to life a disabled vet who comes home to find a measure of solace in the company of a stray cat.
Diantha Jorgensen evokes an intimate world laced with nostalgia in her sparkling collection of micro-fiction pieces.
In this section we have included – a first – two pieces of fantasy. In Emily Lonks’s “Pine Needles”, a dreamy walk in the forest leads to a stirring meditation on life; Nick Palmeri’s hero in “Veltsun”, meanwhile, is faced with a most gruesome dilemma.
The poets are in splendid form this year. “The earth is starting to smell different again,” James Dun Rappaport reassures us in his gentle poem “The Things I Think About in Spring,” while Isabela Maesano sings movingly about lost things we find at the flea market, and so much more.
On the lighter side, opening and closing the magazine, a Lit/Pub take on The Proustian Questionnaire by Max Bennett, and a trip to Iceland by Mimi Isle for a tasty morsel of fermented shark.
Enjoy!