Issue 16 [Winter 2025] – LETTERS JOURNAL

WINTER 2025

LETTERS: from the Editors

Dear Reader:

As we finalized this issue, the two of us met in a small cafe on a wintry afternoon. Sidewalks were slick with black ice; a visit to any reputable news site had a similarly destabilizing effect. Yet we kept repeating to each other how grateful we were to have worked on this issue of LETTERS. These works offer us with hard-won wisdom, difficult honesty, and trustworthy hope, perspectives that—in this time at least as much as in any other—are sorely needed.

We hope you, too, will be nourished by all the works in this issue of LETTERS. In case it’s useful we’d like to offer you some possible entrance points.

If you are struggling to draw strength from community, or want to better appreciate the tangle of expectations and care into which even casual relationships can draw us, start with Julie Salmon Kelleher’s “Saint Brendan the Navigator Sailed in Circles for Seven Years,” Brendan Walsh’s “east hartford,” and Natasha Soto’s “The Angel School.” For works that might inspire you to believe in forgiveness, and grace beyond understanding, try Connor McMahon’s “Visions of Mercy on the Westbound Train,” A. Benét’s “In Which I Defend Esau,” Dale Purvis’ “Like grace the rain,” and Kristin Lueke’s “no other god worth asking.”

If you are seeking solace or understanding on the road of grief and loss, start with Eliana Rose Swerdlow’s Buechner Prize-winning essay “Summoning Sweetcompany,” Alisanne Meyers’ “End of Life, as Needed,” Sreyash Sarkar’s “I Am the Quiet I Keep,” and Amy Ratto Parks’ “Fishing.”

For works that will remind you of the goodness of the human form and spirit, try Mistee St. Clair’s “A Month Without Poetry,” Emma Bolden’s “I Tell Myself the Beloved Can Be the Self,” and Amy Ratto Parks’ “Armoring.” Let David Sheskin’s “Peaceable Kingdom #3” or Jennifer Lange’s “Pink Pelicans”nurture your human love for the natural world. If you are in the mood for praise—or would like to be—read Daye Philippo’s “Aubade,” C. LaSandra Cummings’ “Outside the World,” or Andrew Maxwell’s “canticle.” But if praise will not suit—if what you need is an honest view that, even as it refuses the cheap hope of recovering what was lost, refuses, also, despair, then read Pia Quintano’s “The Seahorse” and Daisy Bassen’s “There, I Fixed it For You.” Or lose yourself in the otherworldly textures of Cynthia Yatchman’s “Arkansas” or the vivid expressiveness of Ellen June Wright’s “Watercolor #5951.”

No matter what brought you to these works, we hope, above all, that you find something true and encouraging in them—something that grounds or lifts or challenges or clarifies or moves you in any way that returns you, once again, to recall our shared and sacred task of being “life / willing to live in the midst of life willing to live.” We feel this sentiment is captured in our cover artwork, Zahra Zoghi’s “Simurgh’s Celestial Sojourn,” which, in its striking detail peering out of dreamy washes of watercolor, captures the way the beauty of life is always expressing itself, from the grand to the minuscule, if only we take a minute to look closely.

Mindy Misener and Lily Rockefeller
Editors

Fiction

Pia Quintano
The Seahorse

Natasha Soto
The Angel School

Nonfiction

Eliana Rose Swerdlow
Summoning Sweetcompany

Alisanne Meyer
End of Life, As Needed

Julie Salmon Kelleher
Saint Brendan the Navigator Sailed in Circles for Seven Years

Poetry

Emma Bolden
I Tell Myself the Beloved Can Be the Self

Kristin Lueke
no other god worth asking

Dale Purvis
Like grace the rain