Letters from the Editors
Dear Reader,
I’m currently sitting in a café with my roommate, who’s illustrating incredible imagery while rain drenches the verdant town of Bellingham. I’ve been flipping through a book about gay werewolves as I’m procrastinating writing this letter to you all, since I don’t always like to think about endings, and a large part of me feels immense sadness that this is the end of my tenure as the managing editor, but I’m also thankful this role has led me to where I am now in this space. It’s almost like I’m living in a painting or postcard immortalized doing the things I love, which is something to be immensely grateful for. Not everyone gets to do this for a living, and it’s been such an honor to be either a small stich in the tapestry of this legacy that is Bellingham Review.
Hands down, this has been the best position I’ve ever had, and I have to thank Ally Wehrle, Jane Wong, the astute editors, and the rest of the wonderful BR team for being incredible people to work with. Thank you all for creating such a healthy and inspiring work environment. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.
The pieces in this edition will leave you smiling, you’ll feel aches in your heart, and keep you thinking on them with these indelible impressions in your mind. “Trash Fortunes” by Lilith Yurkin is such a delightful tale featuring tarot-reading raccoons. Be prepared to commune with urban nature and its cute creatures. “Hotel Room” by Rebecca Bernard is a steamy story of eroticism and deep contemplation of the past. If you want some spice with your stories, then this one won’t disappoint. As someone who grew up speaking both English and Lao and has relatives who only know Lao, “No Speaky Spanish” by Eduardo R. del Rio really struck a chord with me. I’ve had monolingual English-speakers tell me that speaking a language other than English is rude, and I’ve had people make me feel ashamed or embarrassed for speaking Lao. This story made me feel seen and heard. “Application for Partner Visa (Subclass 820)” by Coda Danu-Asmara is such a clever piece and made me think about all the times I’ve helped my immigrant and refugee relatives with filling out paperwork for their survival along with all the trials and tribulations attached to malicious bureaucratic systems. This issue of Bellingham Review will make you see the world in a new perspective, and it might even help you feel a little more understood and a little less alone.
I’m also incredibly thankful to all the authors who contributed to Issue 88 of BR. This issue of Bellingham Review without you. I must thank you as well, dear reader, since Bellingham Review itself wouldn’t exist without you.
Best wishes,
Alex Phengsavath, Managing Editor
Dear Readers,
What a powerful collection of writers to close out the year for Bellingham Review! It has been such a joy finding and spending time with these pieces, and I can’t wait for you all to spend time with them as well.
The pieces in issue 88 are keenly observational, grief-heavy, and overflowing. They compel you to stay with them, to return again, re-read, and become transfixed by. From the surreal experience of swimming through Molly Zhu’s prose poem “The girl who sat down for a minute”, to hanging on to every rain-soaked word at the intersection of John Walser’s “A Shrug of Limbs”, these are poems that you will lose yourself in. The everyday becomes incantatory and brimming with magic.
Family surfaces again and again in this issue: In Elaine Liu’s “Mother Tongue” where “māmā would a leash around my tongue / and tugged the meat loose unit I spat out syllables”. And how Mekleit Dix imagines a mother’s embrace in the space between missed phone calls in “are you my mother?” And so many more moments of imagining and reimagining the family, reconciling, holding close, erasing, and writing over.
While I still feel as if this year has just begun, June has arrived. This year with Bellingham Review has been such a wonderful and special journey—from hearing past BR contributors read on a cold, snowy night around a warm iron-wrought bonfire in the fall, to exploring the world of slime poetry with Taneum Bambrick, and reading so many visceral and haunting submissions that will stay with me for a long time. I am so excited to see what the future will hold for Bellingham Review, and I have no doubt next year will be a bright one. Thank you all for reading, sharing your words, and making what we do possible!
Thanks!
Ally Wehrle, Assistant Managing Editor
Dear Readers,
It’s June here in the Pacific Northwest and the sun is out (for the most part!) and the anemones are trilling their tentacles. It’s also the end of the school year here and I’m so grateful to have worked with such an incredible team of graduate students on BR— with an extra shout-out to my Managing Editor Alex Phengsavath and Assistant Managing Editor Ally Wehrle who are graduating with their MFAs (such talented writers themselves)! This year, we’ve launched two incredible issues and also held vibrant community events through a collaboration with Paper Whale in Bellingham and a free workshop with poet Taneum Bambrick on slime poetics! We’re excited to offer more exciting opportunities for our readers and authors next year — and to welcome our new staff.
Yesterday, I brought strawberries and raspberries into my final graduate class of the year and thought of how sweet fruit can be when shared. I hope this spring/summer issue — Issue 88 — offers a bit of the nourishment you might be looking for. Have it be tendrils of curiosity via paper, poetry, and comix in Mita Mahato's excerpt from Arctic Play, or via unfolding prose poems with parsnips in Emily Koehn’s “Mother Who Wears Her Heart On Her Sleeve Like Too Many Comparisons,” or through the memories of brotherly love in Corey Devon Arthur’s “We Talked Like We Were Still Locked Up Teens.” There’s so much expansive curiosity in each poem, story, essay, and hybrid piece in this issue and I hope you linger in each line, each image, each question. I’m also excited to share a new painting by artist Devon Midori Hale, who is our cover artist for this issue, as well as our conversation about memory, art, lineage, storytelling, and process. We are also sharing this issue during a time in which the genocide of Palestinian people is ongoing; I am thinking too of the necessity of collective action, of demanding accountability, and the power of language as a tool of resistance and hope. May strawberries return to Gaza, may poetry offer seeds for a future we demand.
Till soon,
Jane Wong, Editor-in-Chief
June 2024