EDITOR’S LETTER: Issue 10
By Larry Wormington, Peauxdunque Review Editor-in-Chief/Publisher
Goodbyes are the black cats that surround us—all-knowing, crisscrossing
all paths long before our fearful minds are yet aware of our
next step. Whether we are embracing a comrade in arms after the battles
are done and their path is right and ours is left, standing casketside staring
into the leviathan of all farewells for a parent, sibling, or friend—an
occurrence dropped upon us too many times of late—or just hugging our
child at the airport as they embark on the inevitable next chapter of life (the
one you can’t hold their hand for this time), our throats close, faces leak, and
words wither. Yeah, I’m not a fan. I used to say chipper things like, “We see
the brightest lights from the darkest places,” or, “It’s not goodbye; it’s just
until we meet again.” But life is a cruel teacher, and all too often, goodbye
really is just that, no matter how much our minds claw for some solace that
says otherwise.
Sorry, friends. My aim isn’t to deliver a literary dirge. I’m sure you
have enough of your own splinters to dig out rather than help remove mine.
But the last year has been a challenge here at the Peauxdunque Review,
and there are some farewells, some see you next times, and some outright
adioses afoot. To paraphrase the philosopher Heraclitus, “There is nothing
permanent except change,” and yes, mes amis, changes, they are a’comin’.
So, with that ominous backdrop, I bid you welcome to Issue 10 of
the Peauxdunque Review. As did the nine installments before it, Issue 10
has given of itself completely to forward the story—to fight, bleed, and
ultimately triumph. For what apotheosis is worth our joy or tears unless
the ultimate sacrifice was demanded and given? All the pain, love, fear, and
struggles had to happen before our hearts burst when Frodo turns to Sam
and bids him farewell. If you don’t get this reference, perhaps you’ve picked
up the wrong journal. Let’s have at it then, shall we? Let us see how the
contributors in the pages that follow fared with their time with the ring, and
to what great lengths they traveled to deliver their magic to our fires.
As I have said many times before, I am astonished how the bon
mots of this issue, like so many others before it, somehow seem to echo, and
oftentimes illuminate, the dark corners of my mind. One could say that I am
reading to support an end, to fulfill my own conjured prophesies, but I swear
this is not the case. Yet here I am, heavy in heart, delaying this writing
beyond all reasonable measure, only to find an issue filled with tributes,
eulogies, and haunting epitaphs.
Like Kaitlin Murphy-Knudsen in “Heat,” I, too, “can’t breathe,”
and find the heat of this impending separation “… passing full through
the armored alveoli it is taking centuries to cross, into the body-soft, the
only place the living can know anything.” Kaitlin’s words, like all others I
reference, deliver their full measure within the piece itself, yet I would be
remiss if I did not acknowledge their immediate power to render my current
state. These ripples continue, in Kate Polak’s “When the Batter Overflows,”
this specter of innocence lost, “… as if we didn’t matter. As if we don’t
deserve better….” and Caroline Zhang’s “Tapestry,” where we “… flinch on
instinct,” and “try to reach out, to say it’s okay,” and feel what we know but
cannot ever truly know, that “… no one dares to touch a burning girl.” These
aren’t fond farewells. They are the parts of ourselves that are truly gone,
hacked from the flesh against our will. I am all too aware that the cuts
Caroline’s piece reveals are those of a much more violent, tangible nature,
which can only be experienced by reading on, and inhabiting her coat of
anguished colors for yourself.
Though as we bleed word to page, it is not only to excise our
wounds, but to heal them. Our writer minds vibrate above and around
us at all times, pinging into the ether, with the hope that our signal will
be intercepted by all those hungry seekers in need of it and will thus
reverberate back to us, revealing to sender and receiver some muchneeded
universal truth. For art and love are our only true remedies. And
in Jen Hallaman’s “How to Grieve the Living,” we find the salve that only
perseverance through loss can bring, as she recounts the complications of
the human heart and the power of memory. “We left things as they were.
There was good in her and there was bad in her. Now that she is gone, I
am no longer vulnerable to the bad. This allows me the great privilege
of treasuring the good—remembering it fondly without risk of it being
diminished by the growing presence of hurt or shame.” This, my friends, is
the epitome of writer responsibility—to deliver the griefgold words that fill
the needy pockets of the soul. Thank you, Jen.
Although it’s not loss, or a farewell, in the standard sense, I was
also reminded through many of the pieces within of our duty to deliver
rich morsels of past times and places. Memory is a trickster, and time an
outright thief, or as Vanelis Rivera says in “How to Love a Prophet,” “But
memory is a shapeshifter—its different forms are reliant on the distance
between wanting to know and denial. That is to say, sometimes the stories
we avoid are the ones most necessary for moving on.”
So, when we open our journals and scrapbooks, it’s incumbent
upon us to use the paint we still possess to recreate all the lost worlds
that live within us. In Mark Folse’s “Three Sonnets for New Orleans,” we
find, in Sonnet 2, “This is the neighborhood where I was born, from which
I fled into the city’s heart and sat upon my stoop with ice cold beer to host
my neighbors and so be a part of a true city where the people walk and
linger at their neighbor’s porch to talk.” This place, beloved New Orleans,
surrounds us in these plainly rendered moments. We don’t have to wander.
We are there, rooted in place. But in Sonnet 3, Mark goes one step further,
encapsulating not just the treasures of this city or its people, but of the very
essence of each moment, when he says, “To hurry so misunderstands this
place that clocks itself by Central River Time.” So, we have this place, New
Orleans, and we have this time, sweet hours passing beside the mighty
Mississippi. This is more than enough. This is writer time travel at its
finest.
But this is also hallowed ground, tempered by tempests
unnumerable. What of these ghosts floating in the wind, those stories we
often try to avoid? For that, I present Andy Young’s “Portrait of a Couple
in a French Quarter Apartment.” I could, in all honesty, lay out the entire
piece here, as it captures the essence of all that is and all that was—every
line a wrenching tribute. Instead, I will tease you with this, “my love
just look how we made a feast with such insouciance,” a crescendo, which
demands you consume the whole of the work to truly receive its bounty. And
as my fellow writers have chosen to plop me down into the heart of New
Orleans—demanding I gnaw at the marrow of this rich, delicious place—I
would be remiss if I did not mention at least some of the glory that is Elsie
Michie’s “Trashformations.” When she wasn’t unknowingly chiding my
procrastinations in completing this letter with “… the word velleity which
is so infrequently used it isn’t even in my spell checker. It means a wish, a
desire, or want you take no action to fulfill,” or explaining the delights of
a “Spinning Ouija Brooch,” she was giving a gobsmacking masterclass on
setting as character. Her character, and setting, of course, is New Orleans.
I won’t rob you further of the thrill that is this story. Just know that if you
are in need of instruction on how we, as agents of ether, are to immerse our
readers in a given time and place, Elsie Michie has the answers.
Once again, I have been beautifully distracted off topic. Instead
of wrapping up affairs and bidding adieu, I’ve been sitting on the stoop,
sazerac in hand, as the horns blare and the floats drift by. Thank you.
But it’s time to go—for how long, I do not know. But as I tarry a bit longer,
shifting my feet, I am again heartened by your words, and the hope that
this might not be over just yet. As Emily Simmons says in “Open Doors,”
“… I build my house and the unknown is on the outside but I leave the door
open.”
We came together, my Peauxdunque kin and I, in this special place
to pay homage to our friend and mother, Terry S. Shrum, to make good on
the promise to leave something behind—a stone marker to honor her and
lift up our fellow writers as best we could. Through the amazing work of
our staff and your generous words, I believe we’ve done so. I hope you agree.
And not just because my voice is failing, but because nothing but words from
you all could express it more succinctly, I leave you with another excerpt
from Emily Simmons:
“December Poem.”
I am like and unlike a sparrow
because I will look into the dark beyond the warmth
and wonder, before I go.
Then like a windcaught leaf I’ll go.
I’d like to thank all our contributors, whether they’re mentioned above
or not, for informing and guiding my thoughts on Issue 10. Your work lives
on. And perhaps Peauxdunque Review will, as well. Like the ivory-billed
woodpecker that adorns the cover, once considered extinct but spotted,
possibly, just a year ago, we, too, may be heard pecking away in some
secluded wood. You never know.
Larry Wormington
Editor-in-Chief
Peauxdunque Review
Larry Wormington is a Dallas-based fiction writer who grew up in the piney woods of East Texas. He received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and his BA from the University of North Texas. His stories have appeared in Redivider, Elm Leaves Journal, Harpur Palate, and the fiction anthology Monday Nights, among others. He is a Marine veteran and a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance. Professionally, he works as a technical writer and runs several small businesses in the greater Dallas area – the rest he saves for his Khaleesi and their four incredible children.