Letters from the Editors

Dearest reader,

I write to you from a place of transition right now—I pen this letter in the hours of the night that are simultaneously too early and too late, at a point in the year when the season starts to peel off her cloud-gray and shimmy into something warmer and brighter. Call it a change; call it a hinge. My life teems with in-betweens.

It is these in-betweens that have me thinking about sustenance in the sense of a) having nourishment to draw strength from and b) elongating and letting linger. It is deceptively easy for me to think of events in the world as happening discretely and linearly, as if they were crisply punched into a timeline. The last time I wrote to you, I was rocked with the dark-edged punch-holes of killings, genocide, and war. These violences have not abated; I am learning in real-time that one way to try and live amidst them is to slow down—sustain my attention—and practice resilience for the long and tumultuous haul.

Reader, I am so unspeakably proud of what we have to offer in this issue. These pieces, and more, are how I know I am able to suspend the chaotic flurry in my mind. In Victoria Chen’s “Endings,” the narrator from a Chinese and Taiwanese American enclave grapples with the ways her church imperfectly mourns a young congregation member’s death, the short story pooling into a teasing-out of what constitutes care and what constitutes harms in a community. Brock Storey’s poem “No Night So Dark” lingers on the loss of a loved one, the speaker asserting that, “I am alive but living the way ivy lives: / a slow creep, a crawl / to the light.” Audrey Coble’s “Creep”, a meditation on writerhood and writing, dwells achingly on offering oneself up to be perceived and cared about—and precisely how fraught such an act is. Here, I find sustenance.

In the spirit of in-betweenness, I also have a hand-off: the tenure of a Managing Editor here at Bellingham Review is a lovely and short one. Next season, you will be under the helm of the inimitable Princess Angeli Nuñez. I’ve had the great pleasure of being Princess’s graduate classmate for the past year, in addition to being conference co-panelists, travel buddies, and plain ol’ friends, and I know she’ll guide the journal through ’26-’27 with confidence and joy.

In tandem with Princess is the indefatigable Zheous Abalos as Assistant Managing Editor. Reader, when I tell you Zheous has the keenest eyes for gemstone lines and snippets—he’s awed me with his sense of observation and reverence for all the writing we’ve come across. I have joked before that I always look forward to reading Zheous’s “book review” of a Submittable comment—but it’s true. I really do love it.

You’re in good hands, dear reader. Please enjoy this issue of Bellingham Review.

As always, with sincerity, with gratitude,

Sam X Wong

Dear readers,

I am about to exit the infrastructure of grad school, and this journal. Being an artist of any kind, it helps to have a tether to things like this, so we aren’t just flapping and somersaulting in the wind. To have a tether to some configuration of other artists. In a way, I know that journals can be a flash of that for writers. I am so gratified to have been able to play a role in other artists finding pockets where their work can be housed, a flash of collaboration, and their work in my hands, formatting their lines how they’d like and saving and exporting their headshot into our website’s backrooms. Holding the imagery of tens of ambitious writers, it’s a privilege, briefly mine.

I consider it my privilege to invite you into works like Audrey Coble’s "Creep"– an essay that dissects exactly what it is we are huddled around, as writers but also– for myself particularly—as essayists; the I, the eye, as it roves and intermittently turns back on itself. Poets the likes of Dolapo Demuren, spinning lines that crisscross in recognition of proximity to other beings, storms, neighbors and family:
 "The Thunderclouds mimic / well-meaning children dropping heirlooms upstairs."

Let me rush you through the door of this issue, like an eager host, kiss on each cheek, haven’t seen you in way, way too long.

All my very best,

Cassidy Spencer

Dearest readers,

Recently, I re-taught “Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)” by Gwendolyn Brooks. In the ache of so much happening in the world, I keep returning to her last line: “Live in the along.” The poets, writers, and artists in Issue 92 remind me of what it means to “live in the along”—the messy, the unknown, the vulnerability of us trying to make future worlds possible. In Obiageli A. Iloakasia’s “Migration Blues,” mourning and joy entangle in layers of sensory memory: “Alone / in this new country, my eyes sunken, mourning // miles & years lost to diaspora. My memory forms / a rhythm for joy. It rewinds every birthday // photograph my siblings & I took.” In Joshua Zeitler’s “Transition Diary VII,” their last line keeps stunning me in its radiant tenderness: “Stoop to gather her kiss as if it were a looped poppy head.” And in Shannon Cram’s flash essay “Tuesday Morning” — which pours out in one long sentence — she stays in the belly of a moment of laughter despite loss and fear vibrating through: “this memory will rush over me and flood my eyes and all I will want in the world is to tell you about it.” I’m so proud of this issue and all the portals of “the along” you will enter while reading.

Yesterday, we had our big end-of-the-year Bellingham Review party, surrounded by snacks and drinks and bingo, and it’s hard not to get emotional thinking about this cohort of staff graduating. I’ve been utterly lucky to work with Sam and Cassidy, who have ushered in such beautiful issues and beyond. I will miss strolling into the BR office and seeing the both of them glowing beside the cutest rabbit lamp. I’m also excited to share with you our new editorial team next year! In my own life, I’m ready to hunker back down into the making of poems, with a book that’s taken six years to write, but eons more in my heart. Whenever I come back to my writing practice, especially when I’m working through sticky places of the heart, I always think: “I have no idea what I’m doing.” But I’m just writing in “the along,” in that space between not knowing and just a tiny bit more knowing (and then back again).

With warmth,

Jane Wong