Letter from the Managing Editor

Welcome to Bellingham Review’s Issue 79, our ninth annual online issue! Inside you’ll find the well-woven work of twenty-four different artists including writers of hybrid work, nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. You’ll also find photography by David Scherrer, whose Chefchaouen II is the cover image for this issue.

This issue’s texture is rich and its span wide. In it you’ll find a section titled “We’ve Been Known,” with an introduction by Guggenheim Fellow Denise Duhamel, showcasing poems written by men and women incarcerated at Skagit County Justice Center in response to Duhamel’s poem, “I’ve Been Known.” As part of this section, our editor-in-chief, Susanne Paola Antonetta has written a headnote on mass incarceration that I invite you to read here.

This issue makes me think of my brother. Matt and I live two thousand miles apart and mostly communicate via text, often and obsessively. We both have interest-based nervous systems and become easily fixated—often on revising our approaches to life. I told him recently that when I think about the big questions, I try to turn toward democracy. Which brought up a lot of questions: Where does one go to observe democracy? Who most fully preaches it? Is there a leader?

That my kids ran feral through the house, that my bread began to burn in the oven, and that a rapidly-filling bathtub—which no child would be easily wrestled into—threatened flooding didn’t stop me from getting all sweat-tingle texty in response to these questions. And just in time to keep the smoke detector from splitting our eardrums and the bathtub from falling into the garage below, I think what Matt and I settled on is this: Democracy is not atomic but molecular—sustained by a multiplicity of voices. Democracy is the texture of community, favored and sung to support the many individuals within it. My hope? That you can find that here.

There is something for everyone in Issue 79–suited to various readers and to the various moods of each reader. Whether you read at length, cozied up on a cat-curled couch or in short clips, stolen half hours over a few too-full days, prepare to find new ways of seeing the world in these pages. Prepare for synaptogenesis.

And finally, Bellingham Review wouldn’t be who we are without you, so a big thank you to our readers and contributors! Part of our commitment to community here at Bellingham Review is our vow to provide continued support to our contributors as you find new homes for your work and create new art. Being engaged literary citizens is an effective way we can practice democracy together, to elevate what’s been neglected, to recover what’s been lost. Literature as analepsis.

 

With love,

Allie Spikes