Foreword

Foreword Many of the contributors to this issue are travellers. Their journeys may take them a modest distance or a long way, to destinations exotic or commonplace, desirable or less than desirable. Some of their journeys are not taken entirely by choice. All of them, though, are full of discoveries. Among the short stories, Ursula Le Guin's protagonist in "Geezers" embarks only on a weekend getaway, but while making this brief jaunt, realizes he is facing a whole new world. Kate Wheeler's adolescent hero in "Improving My Average" is always moving from one faraway place to another—now to Cartagena, Colombia, where she is about to learn one of the terrible lessons of growing up. A businessman in Kevin McDermott's superb story "Magic and Hidden Things" travels to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a trip he doesn't at all relish. We are proud to note, by the way, that this is Mr. McDermott's first short story published in the U.S. PeterFord's "Around the Edge," from his upcoming book, describes an expedition he took in 1988 around the Caribbean coast of South America; in this episode Ford recounts his passage from Honduras to Nicaragua and down the Coco River in the company of Indian guerillas. Travel for Judith Ortiz Cofer becomes partly an act of personal liberation. A third essay, "Lily My Sweet" by Judy Ruiz, is a beautiful and frightening portrayal of a sojourn in a state mental institution. In our interview, novelist Thomas Sanchez describes a restless and obsessive creative life. While writing Rabbit Boss Sanchez had to leave this country and live and write in Spain—getting away from a place in order to understand it—a type of experience that is surprisingly common in creative endeavors. Sanchez is one of the more interesting novelists today, applying his considerable talents to ideas, movements, large thematic and even public concerns, as well as to character. This issue's poets are all travellers, ranging freely and often using faraway locations for their settings. Miniaturists and stay-at-homes they are not. David Wojahn travels through history as well as to foreign locales in these offerings from his upcoming collection Late Empire. James Solheim is widely published but has not yet done a book—a whimsical writer who creates a world too fantastic and fully imagined to discredit. Roger Weingarten includes significant new poems from his next collection, among them its title work "Jungle Gliders." Walter Bargen is known primarily as a poet of nature, but these new poems demonstrate wider interests and subjects from the American inner city to a magical visit to Costa Rica. Fans of Mark Twain will recall that Twain was out of this country on a nearly decade-long journey to Europe after his business and financial failures during the 1880s. For his family—especially his two daughters—coming back to the United States was like going to a foreign land. Jean Clemens, the younger daughter, began her diary during this time, and it is intriguing in many ways—for the images that it gives us of New York in the year 1900, for a peek at family life during the climax of the Victorian era, and for the first-hand account it affords of a young woman who has sometimes been characterized by her father's biographers—wrongly, I believe—as a rather pitiful victim. As a young woman who had a severe and persistent form of epilepsy before the age of effective treatments, Jean Clemens was courageous in her attitude towards her condition. SM ^tW ^^——-^CO*?ET'fiW «no STATUS-Corpusd£SS ¡? ÇNEgf péOft-e NO LoH6£R WANfIpSPgNb TwEig Uf£ SaV'»6S 0¿ possession TjViTgcKnM "jfr MM^U'SriC'"I Ä«?*0"' 'i$"¿"»»"pie eist TttEY WaKTTo SPei ThEiE- LiFE-SAV)Wa? QM PoSSíSSiOWíTjWScCtANl" l'rt WTwTt'_ fln¡) ?»»«, -Vapes„ ^W-mfrruJiSm il Vn/Q Ml ...