By Editor-in-Chief J. N. Fishhawk
This is the introductory letter from the Editor-in-Chief that appeared in the 2023 edition of Bacopa Literary Review. If you would like to purchase this edition, it is available on Amazon in print or ebook and you can find it here.
As we assemble each edition of Bacopa Literary Review, we editors are always on the lookout for themes that show up in the pieces we accept. Partly, we do this for the wonder of it. There is a mix of both divination and transmutation that is part of the joy of making a journal, observing as through the process the many disparate parts are brought together into a kind of oneness to make a new thing. But we also watch for and share examples of repeating ideas and motifs as part of the process of organizing the journal’s contents. Sometimes you want two pieces with similar themes close together. Other times, you want to make sure they’re far apart, separated from each other by thickets of unrelated, dissimilar words and ideas.
One year, we discovered that the primary theme, across all genres, was birds. Over the last three years, many of the themes in our contributors’ work have revolved around the COVID pandemic and its attendant issues of physical and mental health and safety. This was especially true of our 2022 edition, in which a number of contributors responded to Poetry editors Reinfred Addo and Oliver Keyhani’s call for work addressing the impacts of the pandemic, and health issues in general, on communities of color.
Imagery is often the easiest thread of commonality to pull out, both within and across genres. This year, many of our Visual Poetry selections coalesced around imagery involving circles, for example. Our Fiction Award and Honorable Mention stories both have titles and thematic aspects that feature the color red. The apparent antagonist of award winner “In the Red” by Lisa Isaac briefly glows ominously red in the narrator’s tail lights, but as its title suggests, the story is driven primarily by the metaphorical financial red of desperate poverty. Emilee Prado’s Honorable Mention piece “Red Yucca” gets its title from the film the protagonists end up as extras for, which in turn takes its name from the flower of the Arizona desert plant. But red also shows up as a visual emblem for the just-missed passion the two main characters share: As she moves away...her shoulder brushes the still-wet graffiti and it leaves a crimson mark on her faded yellow t-shirt. The young woman who, though only an extra in the film, may just get the chance to be a main character in a Missed Connections style romance wears a metaphorical heart on her sleeve.
Emotional and social themes of other kinds are easy to find as well. In both Humor and Creative Nonfiction, editor Stephanie Seguin noted strong themes involving family connections of various types among this year’s contributions. Family provides us with the first and most powerful of questions we social animals must ask, as portrayed with devastating acuity in Sue Hann’s “Portrait and Punctum”: Who are you? Who are you to me? And, sometimes, being family together can provide us with the surprising comfort of answers, as the riverine adventure of “Spirals” by Kathryn Ganfield demonstrates: I thought it was me teaching them…But really, you see, it was my kids teaching me.
Some of these connections center the struggle and brokenness that family too often embroils us in. A number of this year’s contributors have expressed these issues through imagery and narrative devices involving an element that often brings even the most broken and divided of families together, for better or worse: food. Nonfiction “Junk/Food” by Kara Goughnour and Nancy Cook’s fictional “Pa’ella” pull no punches in facing the brokenness. Barbara Westwood Diehl’s prose poem “Menu After Cheating” takes a sly, wry tack, with food as metaphor, vehicle, and accompaniment. Mary Liza Hartong’s Humor Award-winning “Kringle” takes a gentler, if ironic, approach to the way food is woven into the ties that bind: You see, my mother and her brother don’t just share a nose, but a sense of certainty...They’re not haughty; they just know what’s good for you.
This year, one theme came all too easily. The ongoing push for more book bans, gag rules, and other restrictions on the free speech of writers, educators, and media workers here in Florida and around the United States moved us to put out a call for works that address the issue of censorship.
The irony of backwards-facing attempts to limit people’s access to information—especially for students, the current and coming generations of whom are all “digital natives,” children of the internet age—in an allegedly-free society is not lost on us. As writers and editors working both in print and online, we felt moved to raise our voices against this retrograde tide, and encourage others to join us in doing so. Our contributors responded: you will find a number of pieces in Bacopa 2024 that address this growing concern. Though separating words from imagery and the piece as a whole does Visual Poetry a bit of a disservice, I’ll pull a few quotes from the text in Gray Williams’ sardonic piece “Strike Through" to say that we here at Bacopa do not take kindly to people in positions of power trying to tell writers, journalists, teachers, students, and others to be half of yourself…tie up your quirks and politics…make like a cat and fit in this box.
Perhaps the best retort to people who would seek to censor, ban, gag, and redact those they’ve been taught to fear into submission is the reverent joy of queer love as antidote and exit expressed in Hailee Nielsen’s enchanting spell of transformation, “Sh'mot (Names) /Exodus (the Way out)”:
I want to learn to swim, and you know how to swim. From you, a gift: myself, unbaptized, in an ocean with you, mouths open and eyes shut.
Like I was taught to pray.
There is so much more, reader. More to know, more to feel, more to be. We’ve pulled together a sample of some of it here for you. Welcome to Bacopa Literary Review 2023.
