Bellingham Review Publishes Issue 74

The Bellingham Review is pleased to announce the publication of the fourth issue under the editorship of S. Paola Antonetta, Issue 74, which includes a special section of new writing from Canadian women titled “Place and Space in Canada,” the winners of our annual literary contests, as well as a remarkable collection of stories, poems, and essays from US and international writers. The issue features the painting “The Coming Storm” from Susan Bennerstrom, and we are thrilled to share it with you.

Marking the second of four Spring issues of the Bellingham Review which will feature a folio of international writing, Issue 74’s “Place and Space in Canada” includes seven essays, with an introduction by writer and florist Christin Geall, who collaborated with S. Paola Antonetta to curate these remarkable essays: Susan Olding‘s “Odd Jobs,” Frances Backhouse‘s “Homing,” Maria Schamis Turner‘s “Forgiving Vancouver,” Jenna Butler‘s “Translating the Woods: Life in the Northern Canadian Boreal,” and Leone Brander‘s photo essay “Tick Tock Town.” All of these pieces reflect in some way on what it means to live in the charismatic corners of the Canadian landscape.

Also featured are the winners of our 2016 literary contests: Cathy Guo, Abby Bardi, and Marya Hornbacher.

Contest judge Daniel Tobin selected Guo’s poem, “Exegesis After the Storm,” as the recipient of the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry. Tobin said the poem gives us “a beautifully evocative lyrical riff on the spiritual suggestiveness of material things—headlights, snowfall, a glass of roses falling. This is poetry that is more observance than observation, its slippages and associations ‘a kind of praying’ that discerns the momentous in the ordinary.”

Bardi’s short story, “Abu, the Water Carrier,” earned the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. Contest judge Sybil Baker called it “an emotionally complex story with heart” that “covers the familiar landscapes of love, family, and loss.”

Contest judge Joy Castro called Hornbacher’s essay, winner of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, “A pleasure and a provocation” that “takes admirable risks with point of view, asking of readers an unusual level of suppleness and fluidity as we glide among different subject positions and psychic distances from the material.”

You can subscribe to receive this and future issues at bhreview.org or on our Submittable page, at bhreview.submittable.com.

The Bellingham Review is the literary journal produced by Western Washington University’s MFA program. For more information about the multi-genre MFA program, click here.