I am handing this introductory note off to three-time WRJ contributor Amy Marques. Amy’s work was immediately appealing to us since it combines modalities, using book pages as the “canvas” for visual pieces. In addition, Amy is a writer, with a creative nonfiction piece published in the July issue and a prose poem included in this issue. You may find Amy’s work in Issue 18 and Issue 20. I’ll let her take it from here.

Aaron Lelito, Editor in Chief

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I was immersed (and still am) in a collaborative project with words and images when I received the invitation to write the introduction to Wild Roof Journal’s latest. Serendipity! As art often does, the pieces in this issue arrived at just the right time. 

If I had to choose one word for the issue, it would be congruence. That might be because I already have congruence on my mind, but I don’t think I’ll be alone in finding delightful connections between these pieces.

Some intentionally talk to each other, like the two-way collaboration (poetry and collage) between Clive Knights & Terriann Walling or Tyler Barton’s “Policy Mirrors: A Memoir.” Other pieces have accidental conversations, and one imagines the editors connecting the dots and grinning as they put the issue together, hoping we’ll find the threads that weave from one piece to the next. 

One example is how Zoë Luh’s “ode to red but not in anger” and “ode to red but not in hope” titles are echoed and answered in Nicole Farmer’s “What is Lost, What is Blue” when she says, “When I say blue I mean you have sent me to the moon. . . . When I say blue I mean hope.” Another is when Maggie Rue Hess’ “Call Me Garden” with “our woundings / woven / remorselessly into a nest” and Tracy Ahrens’ “roots” are read alongside Nancy Jorgensen’s “Babies in Bloom,” where flowers and babies and family and growth and fire and temperament are woven together in a lyrical essay of nature and nurture. In fact, the whole issue speaks to complex relationships and connections, sometimes painful, albeit loving. In “For Lisa, June 30,” Nina Clements acknowledges how “depression and mania [are] never slow / and steady,” and Lisa Allen’s poem writes about what is and isn’t texted to a loved one, and Kika Dorsey reminds us of how love always returns, while Sally McClellan reminds us that sometimes it never returns.

There is a thread of belonging in the collaborative poetry/collage work and in Greta Hardy-Mittell’s “Land Available:,” asking “I’m still learning to ask where I would be,” and Alex Rasmussen’s (brilliantly titled) “knowmad” answering “remember that these places / and these people / are the answer to everything.” While Adam M. Sowards’ “War and Geese” mentions that sometimes we are unaware of the rules of life’s games, William Welch’s “Contrary. Confirmed” reminds us to heed the wisdom of the quiet friars and slow down. And sprinkled throughout these words, connecting these dots with evocative color, are the brushstrokes of Harry Bauld and Jennifer Willoughby (with her aptly entitled “Connection”) and the haunting image of Jodi Balas’ “Exodus.”

In the midst of belonging and loneliness and loving connection laced with pain and missed opportunities, Aley Schiessl-Moore’s “A Scream” cries out, and Molly Smith’s “Acorn” reminds us: “I cannot reach towards the sun without cracking this shell.” 

I hope this issue cracks your shell a bit more. As it has mine.  

Amy Marques