Letter from the Editor-in-Chief
How do you write a letter from a different world? Last March, roughly a year ago, my Bellingham Review folks and I were at the San Antonio AWP, the writer’s conference that normally hosts 10,000+ people, but had many last-minute cancelations due to Covid. Some convention center halls felt windily empty; you could leisurely zigzag through the Bookfair.
How this new virus would affect us all looked potentially ominous, but “potentially” was still a somewhat operative word. Attendees avoided hugs and handshakes and did the recommended elbow knocking, but knocked with a showy flourish, the move was so new. When people mentioned Covid, they still added the “19.” Thousands had still shown up—many many elbows—doing the normal AWP things: buying books, talking to authors, forgetting to eat and gulping in swag Hershey’s kisses for lunch. Wondering, if you’re me, how a high school dropout from northern New Jersey ever got here.
That AWP happened on the other planet we once occupied, or at the teeter-edge of that planet. Our new one has been masks, illness, rising death tolls. And the other awful events of this past year, like the deaths at the hands of police that keep getting called “reckonings,” even though “reckonings” implies the thing being reckoned with will change.
Many things were very wrong before the pandemic spread here, and some things are improving now. But this has been an extraordinarily hard year, even for those of us privileged enough not to have felt its particular, individual, harms and losses.
It’s an act of selflessness to care about literature not your own at any time. You can at least chew on your metaphorical pencil eraser, when it’s yours, and imagine the Pulitzer Prizes about to rain down on you. But bringing forth other people’s. As in this issue: Sheikha Helawy’s story of the wooden wardrobe-dowried bride, Esther Ra’s corona of sonnets on the spread of the coronavirus in South Korea. A section of asemic writing, writing that offers a connotative visual language “signifying nothing,” in the words of Hamlet, and also everything.
So I want to dedicate this editor’s letter to Stephen Haines and Keegan Lawler, my Managing Editor and Assistant Managing Editor. Stephen’s is a compensated position, but not nearly enough. Keegan’s is not. The time and care it takes to read the many fine manuscripts we get and do the production work of getting a journal out, with all the tasks that come along with that, is more than I can tell you and far more than you’d have the patience to stay with me about. We do have wonderful graduate students who review our manuscripts first and serve as genre editors. We don’t have a designer, or any other paid staff. We don’t have production people, people to raise our operating funds or manage them, we don’t have elves. Stephen gets these online issues up himself.
So great thanks to Stephen for all that managing, which means doing a thousand things well, far beyond doing the editorial work of handling manuscripts. And doing all of this in the era of Zoom, with its online submission reading and issue finagling as well as calling up many little people-boxes and speaking at them to get things done. Thanks to Keegan for putting in time so generously, pitching in on the fun stuff, like selecting art and talking through submissions together, but joining in with equal gusto on things like proofreading. We can add to the litany above that this year, we got here to these words.
-Susanne Paola Antonetta
SUSANNE PAOLA ANTONETTA is Editor-in-Chief of Bellingham Review.