Issue #82

Hello friends of Mud Season Review!

Welcome to summer! This is my favorite time of the year. Remind me of this when I start complaining about days of 90 degrees plus Fahrenheit and 70 percent humidity in the dead heat of an Iowa summer.

The MSR team is delighted to bring you the extraordinary selections for issue 82. Poet Douglas Fritock, nonfiction-writer Bliss Goldstein, and fiction-writer Sarah Clapp will have you laughing, crying, and nodding in agreement. All of our selections are accompanied by intriguing art from Willy-O, Lindsay Lamp, and our featured artist Ryota Matsumoto.

Quite by accident, our selections for this issue examine relationships with parents. The father in Fritock’s “Inspo Obituaries” sends his son sample obituaries with notations like “To the point” or “Sounds too old.” “Rusty” and “That” highlight the quirkiness of parents that makes me chuckle, as I’ve noticed similar traits in my own parents (who are in their mid-90s). Fritock’s portfolio is accompanied by Willy-O’s “Someone you were hoping I might be (66),” one in a series that explores the “fantasies and desires we pile atop each other and the invariable disappointment when that all comes crashing down.” This selection is 3.5” x 4.2” mixed media on paper.

The narrator in Sarah Clapp’s “Little Minnie” is a former child star who is “the youngest has-been there ever was.” After Little Minnie ages out – much to the disappointment of mother and daughter – Veronica’s (aka Little Minnie) last role is caring for her mother as she progresses through the stages of dementia. When the mother can no longer make the distinction between her daughter and Little Minnie, Veronica takes the opportunity to whisper, “’Sometimes you were mean to Little Minnie.’ Mom doesn’t say anything. What could she say?” Lindsay Lamp’s “Kyoto,” a 2,500- x 3,600-pixel digital painting, accompanies Clapp’s piece. Lindsay’s work will be featured in the upcoming Pride365 exhibition in Tokyo.

Bliss Goldstein writes about friendship and family in her piece “Hollywood Chuck, Patron Saint of Wonderment.” Goldstein develops a friendship with a man she met on a meditation app, and as their friendship deepens, and they decide to meet face-to-face. Through their discussions, Chuck (and readers) learns about the narrator’s difficult relationship with her mother, a woman with “extraordinary beauty who spat on her daughter’s creative endeavors.” This criticism extended into the narrator’s adulthood and was the fallback rationale for not doing what “fed [her] soul – writing.” After their one and only meeting, Hollywood Chuck passes away from cancer (cancer sucks. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been touched by it in some way), but not before he delivers the punch that begins to shake loose his friend’s internalized negative message: “You’re a big girl now. And big girls write their own damn stories.” Lindsay Lamp’s “The Joy I Hold,” a 1,640- x 2,360-pixel digital painting.

Our featured artist portfolio for this issue is Ryota Matsumoto, an artist, educator, and architect who is based in Japan. Matsumoto notes that “[t]hese works are created as visual commentaries on speculative changes in notions of societies, cultures and ecosystem… (in the) constantly shifting topography and geology.” Look for more commentary by Matsumoto in his interview with MSR Art Editor Michelle Kite, to be published in July.

As a history nerd, I enjoy reading… well… history. National Geographic publishes a number of magazines including the flagship National Geographic Magazine, National Geographic Kids, and National Geographic History. I keep a close eye on my mailbox every other month and practically grab my copy of National Geographic History straight from my mail carrier’s hand. The cover story for the July/August issue is “250 Years of the United States: The Double-Edged Legacy of the Great Experiment.” It’s a great read that examines pivotal events from the 18th century through 2022. Missing from the text, however, is any mention of the January 6, 2021, insurrection. This is, I believe, a glaring exclusion. Still, if you can get your hands on a copy, it’s worth reading.

And now, a few words from our team: help us to help you to get published! We understand the push to submit work to our publication – we love to read what you’ve written! However, we have a few reminders: double space (poetry excepted) your work, don’t submit PDFs or previously published work, and read some of the work we’ve previously published to get a feel for what we’re looking for in submissions. It’s a good idea to review all of our submission guidelines here before you click “submit.”

Have a wonderful summer, and we’ll see you back here in September.

Suzanne Guess, MFA
Editor in Chief
Mud Season Review