Letter from the Editor
Dear Reader,
As a child growing up in Connecticut, I knew of Florida only as the mythical land my grandparents drove to each January and returned from each March. There was no way to predict that Florida would one day be my home. There was no way to know that the drained swampland would be where I, and the nine million people of South Florida, would shelter in place against COVID-19 or where many of us would risk our lives in essential work. Reading through our submission pool in 2020, our staff, like so many, moved our work online. The ability to connect over the pieces of writing and art we love became a fragile thing, that much more important to nourish and preserve.
People trust us with their work, a humbling experience regardless, but even more so publishing in 2021 and selecting submissions in 2020. In submitting their work, each contributor sent their voice out into the swamp, a pulsing light, hoping to be seen. In our selection process, we looked for pieces that were pleasurable—not always easy, not always joyous, but pieces that demanded to be discussed and shared. Pieces which would inspire us to create and connect. How might we view the world if we believed the sandhill crane had just as much sentience and rage and empathy as we do? If we believed a whole world existed on the back of a mayfly, and another world inside of that—so intricate, so easily destroyed, so precious?
The strange, the uncanny, the unsettling do not have to be the horror of a world gripped in precarity. We hope to offer you a place in these pages to embrace precarity and celebrate the strange. In our South Florida Feature, Mary Block writes of the uncertainty and vulnerability of life in South Florida: “Starting in June we can hear /the hurricanes being born /off the coast of Africa. / I say we, of course, meaning you / meaning make this your problem, too. / Meaning stay here.”
Stay here. Feel something in this moment. If you can, we have done our work well.
Chey Wollner
Managing Editor, Swamp Ape Review