Dear Fellow Readers and Writers,
Like many rural Mainers, I have a garden. My garden is fenced, so my dogs can roam freely (without harassing wildlife), and plants can grow without being overgrazed (by that same wildlife). A fence is a container, and like all containers, it necessarily distinguishes what is internal from what is external. It makes a space legible, personal, and establishes responsibility as well as its limits. A fence is a tricky thing, though. Every fence excludes more than it contains and, through exclusion, can give the impression that what grows inside is more valuable, more worthy of regard, than what falls outside.
Perhaps you know where I’m going with this. A literary journal is a garden with a fence. Inside that fence blooms a carefully tended selection of work. An attentive editor considers the space work needs to bloom, to be savored, such as Liberty Ferda’s Thirst and Jeffrey-Michael Kane’s Things that Wait. They consider sequencing, the way a gardener plans for bloom succession, so as one line closes, another line opens, as in mace dent johnson’s Diatomaceous Earth and Elle Peaveler’s Every Creeping Thing. They consider the beauty of contrast as much as complementarity, as in Emily Ladd’s Voicemails and Gustavo Vázquez-Lozano’s The Ash Father. And, above all, they must always consider limits, particularly of time and attention. These limits aren’t faults; they are the very real contours of our capacities.
Limits are only part of the story, though. Dialectics teaches us that internal dynamics shape external features, and external dynamics mold internal features. Outside a journal’s fence grow wild literary gardens–whole ecosystems of it–in different stages of development: work like deeply rooted oaks, vital but too large to fit; work like seeds that float by on pappi, just out of reach; work like hungry flowers that need more light or water or fertilizer than the journal can in one season offer.
This is my final issue as Co-Editor of The Maine Review. As I unlatch the gate and walk beyond the garden, I’d like to dedicate this issue to those writers whose blooms fell just outside our fence, and honor here the ongoing struggle we all face: to hear and be heard in a noisy world, to savor and be savored in an age of speed, to hold and be held in an era of waste. My hope for future issues of The Maine Review as Chelsea Jackson continues as Co-Editor and as we welcome Cavar Sarah as the new Co-Editor, is that they, and all the Readers, Associate Editors, and Editors who tend this community garden, continue to cultivate what is authentically Maine about the journal, and also reach over the fence to welcome in wild petals.
Like many gardeners, I put down my pruning shears with sadness, but also with a sense of relief. I find happiness now in cultivating an increasingly rare bloom: gratitude for the labor of others.
With Love & Solidarity,
Rosanna
Co-Editor, The Maine Review
