Foreword

Foreword One of the legends about the Ufe of thirties blues musician Robert Johnson is that one afternoon at a lonely Mississippi crossroads he made a deal with the devU, trading his soul for genius. Some years ago, I heard an otherwise inteUigent writer (of some note) claim in a public reading that this event had actuaUy occurred. It always surprises me when people flatly state metaphoric ideas to be "so true" as to be the same as Uteral truth. I questioned him about it and he eventuaUy peevishly admitted that he didn't really beUeve that there was a devU who went around appearing and offering deals. Yet having admitted this, he reaffirmed that Robert Johnson had made such a deal with the devU anyway. More or less. On such non sequiturs conversations die. Yet he was right about the legend being compeUing. The mysterious Johnson appears to have flowered quickly from a soso harmonica player in 1929 to a fuU-blown guitar and songwriting genius in the mid-thirties. The "crossroads" of the story is part of its appeal, too, because it suggests one of those moments when one has a clear but dangerous choice. In legends and myths we construct worlds with such big choices. The devU makes his offer, you decide. Of course, real Ufe isn't usuaUy that clear cut. We sometimes don't recognize turns in the road. For any number of reasons—busyness, preoccupation, the disinclination to think about certain things—we may choose either without knowing or without attending to what we know. We flow along Uke water taking what seems to be, but seldom is, the path of least resistance. One of the preoccupations of Uterature, particularly storytelling, is to reconstruct the connection between character and fate. Literature is in this sense a reUgious enterprise: it asserts, as an article of faith, that there is a conjunction between who we are, what we choose to do, and what happens to us. The weave between character, choice, and outcome can sometimes be perplexing and subtle, but there is finaUy a pattern. In this issue's prose, the stakes are high. Characters come to crossroads almost as dramatic as in the legend of Robert Johnson and the devU. In Deborah Way's Editors' Prize-winning story "You Think I Care," a teenage girl, who thinks she is invulnerable, runs smack against the fact that she isn't. The story depicts the phenomenal mental agitity with which the teenager tries to hold onto her seti-image no matter what. In Lloyd Zimpel's amazing historicaUy set story "Beiderman and the Hard Words," the fates mistake the patriarch of a pioneering famUy for Indiana Jones and keep imposing chaUenges, almost comical in their extremity, on him and his famUy, testing them beyond aU reasonable limits. Lauren Slater's personal essay "Black Swans" describes equaUy bizarre calamities of a psychological sort as Slater relates her own experience with an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Adults in love can be almost as helpless and vulnerable as kids, as is the case for Nancy Kincaid's smitten middle-aged professor in "Why Richard Can't." Kincaid seems to wonderfully empathize with her male protagonist as he wrestles with the question of whether he should stick with the unfulfilting known or take a leap into the promising unknown. Paula Huston's "Serenissima" depicts a simUarly powerful attraction, a woman's love for a place that represents freedom and romance to her but where she encounters something so unexpected and incongruous that it haunts her for life. Jon BUlman's story "When We Were Wolves" and Scott Boylston's "Captains By Default" concern boys' games and how they can get out of control. Both are about that thin tine between playing by the rules and terrible destruction, how often we may skate up to the Une, flirt with it, almost cross it—or indeed may do so and change our Uves forever. Kathy Fagan's Editors' Prize-winning poems are very much crossroads poems that explore emotional thresholds and imagine paths not taken. Our other poets—Liz Rosenberg, Kevin Stein and JuUa WendeU—aU write about the influences of obsessive famUy relationships...