Letter from the Editor
Dear Reader,
It’s a funny thing, finding myself in the position of Editor in Chief for this funky little magazine. To start, there’s only one chance I have to get it right: my time in this role is limited by the three-year length of the MFA creative writing program at Florida Atlantic University, meaning any Editor in Chief holds this position for a single year. Every seasonal quarterly issue is my last for that season; this print issue is my first and last chance to experience spearheading a physical publication. Further, I entered this role at a time when the magazine had moved largely online but was beginning to venture, so to speak, back out into the swamp again. So I write to you now in limbo, the space between first and last, between virtual and personable, between seemingly normal and obviously strange.
Any writer wrestling with the balance between surprising language and being understood, or mediating between form and sound, is intimately aware that limbo is a generative place, an estuary for this work. Our magazine looks to live in similar spaces, showcasing art that holds a tender tension between unsettling and beautiful, or between straightforward and coded. In this issue, Michelle Seaman’s poem “At Flatwoods Park, Florida, 1995” explores this balance by examining the divides— are there any?— between animals and human animals through appetite and behavior. Or take the balancing act that is the poetic form ghazal: demanding repetition from the poet’s every line, a ghazal forces a poet to find new ways to approach the same word. Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade navigate that dialogue expertly in our South Florida Feature that showcases some of their co-written ghazals. All of the pieces of this issue engage with the unsettled and difficult to define, from the broken language used by Becca Rae Rose in “Snap the Blue One” to the art of Despy Boutris that lives between poem and image.
Lately I’ve felt that these tense, evocative kinds of spaces have been squeezed smaller and smaller through the pressure of certainty. In times of turmoil, we’re often drawn to statements that sound solid and sure, or feel compelled to make such statements ourselves. Perhaps this magazine can be a corner of resistance to that demand for surety— I, for one, would feel relieved if that particular pressure disappeared from my life. What I do feel certain of, however, is our human need for curiosity, and how much the world needs us to be comfortable in these states of not-knowing. If we are open to these spaces of limbo, we create space for powerful, catalytic conversations. My hope for this issue is that it fuels your work and powerful conversations. If these pieces unsettle you, linger in your mind as unresolved, or introduce us to strange and curious places, then this magazine has lived up to its swampy roots even through dry times. Or rather, is continuing to do so, balancing in the precious limbo of growth.
Eileen Winn
Managing Editor, Swamp Ape Review