I am handing this introductory note off to WRJ collaborator Rachel Lauren Myers. In addition to being an enthusiastic supporter of poetry and the people who write it, she has shared some of her own work in previous issues. Rachel was a guest on podcast episode 22 (audio/video) and episode 19 (audio/video), and her episodes are certainly worth a listen! I’ll let her take it from here.

Aaron Lelito, Editor in Chief

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Last night, as I read through this issue, a rare blue supermoon crawled its way across the Nevada sky. I am packing (or more accurately, avoiding packing) for a move from the high Nevada desert to a coastal town on Cape Ann in Massachusetts. All of my reading and writing this week is shaded by anticipation, by this move where I leave behind vast emptiness, dry sand, the piss-wet smell of sagebrush, and go forward to big water, morning gulls and church bells. I think all desert people know a little bit about water-longing. I sometimes think artists best know how to relate and connect with the world around them, how to process.

I found this issue came to me right when I needed it. Mikaela Stiner describes a craving for “bigness,” for “gusts of wind, when everything scatters.” Aimee Chor gives us the recipe both for a delicious savory broth and for forgiveness and acceptance of the self: “try to remember / neutrinos pass through the earth every second / not touching anything, not even oceans.” Stewart Taylor’s Cima Dome Fire series tugs at my western heartstrings with its palette of burn scar and dirt against a blue sky. At some point I stopped trying to think forward to what I would write for this little introductory note, and instead let myself sink into each piece, reading for myself.

I enjoyed paging through this issue this way, through the particular lens of my upcoming change, under a full blue supermoon, eating the last of the summer blackberries. Yesterday, the air thickened with haze, and I knew a fire was nearby. Tomorrow, I’ll continue packing. Today, I am so pleased to introduce this issue to you. I hope you connect to these pieces as I have. I hope on whatever travels you undertake, you feel “this bigness-wish” that art instills in all of us (Mikaela Stiner, again) and reach for your pen, or your brush, or your camera. May you find inspiration in these pages. 

Rachel Lauren Myers