Issue #79

“Such a violence in hating the things you once loved,” Karren writes in the poem “First Chair,” after comparing the sound of a stone sliding on ice to “a loon having its call forced down its own throat.” The writing in this issue acknowledges violence: the violence of domestic abuse, in Cline’s “A Way Out of Nowhere”; the violence of spontaneity, the violence of breaking with the past. Tempering the violence of emotions is uncertainty, as Calla remembers her father saying in Hammond’s story “Dove”: “No one knows. No one has certainty.” And in uncertainty, as he notes, lies freedom. Freedom to listen to voices from the past, to set out on a new future, to speculate about the afterlife, whether it’s after death, after growing up, or after radical change. In the poem “You Wouldn’t Like It Here,” Karren is “Sure that the dead don’t return”—until he isn’t. After escape comes reflection, memory, haunting. Follman’s paintings play with these same elements: the energetic brushstrokes, rocky and feathery at once, smooth into ghostly human forms.

When we first started Mud Season Review, Peter Biello, as the founder of the Burlington Writers Workshop, interviewed us for a podcast, and I remember his asking what we hoped for the journal in five or ten years. I hoped that we were starting something that could be sustained, that in ten years the journal would have featured that many more poets, writers, and artists, sharing their wide-ranging voices and visions. I couldn’t be happier to see it thriving independently, now on its 79th edition, with volunteer editors and readers from around the country and the world.

Rebecca Starks, co-founder, Mud Season Review

The last time I wrote an editor’s letter was in 2017. So much has happened since then. So much has happened this week. The world felt heavy then. It feels so much heavier now.

As Rebecca writes, this issue’s pieces acknowledge violence and show the freedom in escape. Through these pieces also runs a thread of deep isolation. In both Cline’s “A Way Out of Nowhere” and Hammond’s “Dove,” young women are caught in the isolation of unresolved generational trauma and unchecked authoritarian control (one under a controlling mother, the other under an abusive stepfather).

I think back on the first meetings of Mud Season Review, when we were shaping our vision for the journal. Connection and community rose to the top. Our goals were to create a journal that would both strengthen our own Vermont writing community, as we worked to build it together, and connect us to the broader world as we invited in artists and writers from far beyond our little state. At the heart of the journal, always, was the drive to take the time to connect fully with each artist and writer we welcomed in.

In “Dove,” a young woman begins to break free of her isolation by taking a chance to send her writing out into the world and to put her heart in the hands of a family friend and hope her feelings are acknowledged and returned. They are. In “A Way Out of Nowhere,” when family, friends, and police fail to protect her, a young mother escapes her isolation, and rescues herself and her children from abuse, by taking a chance to put their lives in the hands of strangers and hope they see their shared humanity. They do.

Thank you to the current staff of Mud Season Review for inviting Rebecca and I back into this space for a visit. It’s served as a reminder that the world may feel heavy, but the power of human connection remains.

Danielle Thierry, co-founder, Mud Season Review

It was my honor to work with Rebecca Starks and Danielle Thierry, co-founders of Mud Season Review. The entire MSR team also expressed their thanks for their insight and expertise in selecting the outstanding work we’re publishing in our tenth anniversary issue. They were wonderful to work with, and they helped me with some details that might have been missed.

Publishing an issue is an all-hands-on-deck process. We routinely receive hundreds of submissions. After the final art, fiction, poetry, and nonfiction selections are made, we need to confirm availability and approval to publish (if you receive one of these requests, please respond as soon as possible!). The copy-editing process is next, in collaboration with the writers. At this point in the process, the Art Editor reviews submissions and selects a featured artist’s portfolio, and individual pieces to be paired with the genre selections. Again, we need to confirm availability and approval to publish, so please respond when you receive a notification (do you sense a theme here?). Once the approvals are received, the entire issue must be packaged for our Managing Editor who puts it all together and clicks “publish.”

Because of the volume of submissions for each issue, reading and reviewing all of them is a monumental task for our readers and genre editors – and everyone is a volunteer. The journal succeeds because of their dedication to our art and the opportunity to continue the high standards that Rebecca and Danielle established for Mud Season Review.

Suzanne Guess, MFA, Editor in Chief, Mud Season Review