Issue #46

Our featured art series for Issue #46 takes stillness as its starting point. In black and white, we see a space often filled with action – violent action – through a different vantage point. As Kristin Fouquet focuses our attention on the periphery, the weights in the corner, the worn brick, the neglected metal locker doors, we as viewers come to see beauty in this well-worn place.

Lisa Beech Hartz, this issue’s featured poet, also brings us on a journey of new understanding. She invites us to revisit classic works of art – and the artists who created them – through a series of ekphrastic poems. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner converse through the lines of Hartz’s poetry: The tension that shaped their married life and their art drives the lines forward, as does the finely tuned language.

In “Portrait of a Marriage as a Young Thing,” fiction writer Kathryn Ordiway asks readers to contemplate the vagaries of marriage through the eyes of a woman newly entered into it. She’s witty, wryly observant, and perhaps a little stressed out. Says fiction reader (and nonfiction co-editor!) Amber Colleen Hart: “The author masterfully puts us deep inside the narrator’s head, showing us the uncertainties that exist in the relationships we choose and those that are thrust upon us.”

Nonfiction author Chelsey Clammer, in “The Shape of a Day,” also explores a relationship, but one that has ended and begun again, in a new and different form. Nonfiction reader Coty Poynter called the piece “highly intimate, beautiful and raw.” Each word carries weight in this compact piece; the story hinges on the details. Through them we see the moments that make and remake who and how we love.

Thanks for reading Mud Season!

Erin Post, managing editor