With all the other editors, I want to welcome you to our Summer Contest Issue. Congratulations to our Nonfiction Prize winner Suzanne Gray, for her essay “Bridge of Cards,” and to runners-up Mollie Murrray, for her essay “Dysfunction,” and Catherine Mauk for “The Third Eye.” Meredith Hall, author of Without A Map, one of the most heartbreaking, tough-minded, and inspiring memoirs I have ever read, served as our judge.
This issue also includes three remarkable meditations on how we live and remember, Caitlin McGill’s “Breaking Boundaries,” Sharon Doorasamy’s “Drowning in Margaret Culkin Banning’s Pool,” and Maija Rothenberg’s “J is for Juxtapose.”
As always, I am delighted by the variety of approaches taken by the nonfiction in this issue, which is a testament to the vitality and plasticity of the contemporary essay.
One last thing: it is a benefit (although sometimes a bane) of online journals that we afford readers the opportunity to comment on the work. I’d like to take this opportunity to urge you to do that; being an essayist is a lonely business. Much of the time you do not now if anyone is even reading your work beyond the editors who chose it. So, please, if you are stirred, challenged, prompted, inspired, or otherwise moved by a particular essay, the comments box is the perfect way to let the author and editors know.
Thanks. Enjoy your reading.
Richard Hoffman is the author of nine books, including the memoirs Half the House and Love & Fury; the story collection Interference and other stories; the essay collection Remembering the Alchemists and other essays; and five books of poems: Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, which won the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award; Emblem; Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for poetry; and People Once Real.
