Letter from the Managing Editor
Welcome to Bellingham Review’s Issue 81, our tenth annual online issue! Inside you’ll find the wonderful work of sixteen unique writers of hybrid, nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. You will also find photography by David Scherrer, whose piece, The Gorge, graces our cover.
As we finalized this new issue, the 2020 presidential election loomed. In truth, I waited to compose this letter until the results were finalized. It felt impossible for me to know what I would want to say without first hearing who the next president would be. And whatever I might have written if Donald Trump had won—whatever that message might have looked like—has passed now into that mercurial realm of what if?
Suffice it to say that the last four years have been remarkably tumultuous, and moreover that 2020, in particular, has been an extraordinarily difficult year. I feel compelled to note here, if merely for the sake of posterity, that as I write this message, more than 230,000 people have perished from Covid-19 in the United States alone, and 1.26 million have died worldwide. We live in scary, stressful times, to say the very least of it, and as my partner, Kelli, has remarked more than once as of late, we are certainly all “living through history” right now.
As my partner and I waited for the results of the presidential election, the global pandemic was never far from our minds. And as we waited, and as the counting of the ballots dragged on in an election that would prove both historically prolific and incomprehensibly divided, we felt as though we were living in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Time seemed to slow—then pause. Some strange fog settled over our surroundings, obscuring distances, creating apprehension. I knew that we were not alone in this feeling, and yet the feeling could not help but be isolating. Isolation, in the time of quarantining and social distancing, was not alien, and yet this felt in a way entirely different. We refreshed NPR’s electoral map five, six times per hour, laughing at the memes, ubiquitous in our social media feeds, that had all been adapted to illustrate this terminal iteration of collective 2020 anxiety. It was November, after all. The finale of this year, naturally, just had to be this way.
And then the morning of Saturday, November 7th arrived, and with it came an immediate sense of movement. The first steps taken out of a blurring haze. The roar of an engine finally turning over. Wheels spinning, gripping, once more. A new president and a new year were both on the horizon.
This movement, this persistence, is omnipresent in the beautiful art gathered herein. In this new issue, you’ll find unique identities and perspectives converging into something undeniably and unforgettably human, pieces that encapsulate both struggle and ease, stalling and acceleration, being and becoming.
Our stunning cover photo, The Gorge by David Scherrer, captures a train in motion alongside a river. In David’s headnote, he describes this picture using words like “adapt” and “equilibrium.” It is my most earnest wish that Issue 81 will complement the tidings of a more comprehensible and forgiving future, will bring you joy, wonder, and hope as we round this arduous, elongated bend into 2021. And though it’s impossible to say for certain, I choose to believe that the future can and will be reflective of Issue 81, can and will be a future filled not with the regret and loss of pondering what if? in mistakes, but instead bursting with the what if? of possibility. The what if? of tenacity. The what if? of art and life itself.
Yours sincerely,
Stephen Haines