editor’s note

There’s a common theme I see among artists—and writers are artists—on social media, and it’s the shrinking away from self-promotion. We start our posts by saying, “Please forgive this...” and “I promise not to...” We post the link to our publisher shyly once a week and worry that we are wearing out our welcome with our audiences, who are mostly made up of our friends and family and who probably want to hear more from us!

I’m guilty of this, absolutely. My bravado only goes so far before I cower back inside my cave of self-doubt and embarrassment.

But recently, and I mean sometime between November 6th and today, I found myself telling other artists on social media that we all need more. More celebration, more unabashed enthusiasm, more putting our gorgeous selves/ideas/paintings/poems/whatevers into the world to increase beauty and solace and camaraderie and community.

Right after the election, though, I did not feel this way. For maybe the first time, I did not immediately turn towards poetry and art to help make sense of disaster. In fact, I rejected it. I wanted a minute to feel the weight of what’s at stake for so many. For the most vulnerable among us about to be made even more so. For our tender, struggling, beloved planet. I wanted a minute to feel steeped in loss. To grieve what could have been and what's to come.

Maybe it’s taken me exactly this long—one month between that day and this—to feel ready to come back to art and say with some kind of authority and sincerity, Here, read this. It will help.

So that’s what I’m saying to you now as you enter the world of our 15th online issue at The Fourth River. In a time of grief and turmoil and anxiety, I offer you these poems, stories essays and photographs and I hope they help. Imagine each of them like a smooth stone plucked, perhaps, from a riverbed, that you can carry and worry in your pocket for as long as you need it.

Hold on to it. Hold on.

*

My thanks to our MFA student editors for the Herculean task for reading our submissions and making recommendations to our genre editors, and to our genre editors, Marc Nieson, Heather McNaugher and Anjali Sachdeva, for their help shaping the final, wonderful product. Thanks to Managing Editor Kristy Mahoney for literally everything else.

You know what has helped me during this time and will continue to? Knowing I can rely on these people in my small, loving community to work together to make something real and valuable.

I hope you will turn to yours and find what you need there as well.

Thank you, writers and thank you, readers of The Fourth River for being part of our small, loving community.

--Sheila Squillante

Editor-in-Chief