Editors' Introduction

Two of our goals with this issue of Red Cedar Review were to expand the range of voices included in our pages and to showcase more experimental works. We've included two essays that play with instructional forms: Korey Kuhl's How to Button Your Father's Pants and Brad Johnson's American Detour in Paris: A Step-by-Step Guide to Re-creating a Nightmare. We also found ourselves very interested in prose and poetry that use the space on the page in an interesting way, notably Pamela Davis's Blind Date with Baudelaire and Weston Cutter's Minnehaha Creek. Nonconventional stories like Dan Moreau's A Sad Short Story and Cynthia CL Roderick's Glad to See You are strong examples of effective experimentation with voice and form. We've also included pieces that blur genre lines such as Gavin Craig's Patriarchal Poetry and Philip Zachary Lesch's Flying Home.

This issue includes photography by the University of Michigan's Nicolas Beier, Michigan State University students Josh Radtke and Hasib Yousufzai, MSU and Red Cedar Review alumnus Ryan Long, and Elinor Teele. Our cover photo by John M. Quick showcases our namesake, the Red Cedar River.

Author Michael Kimball visited MSU's campus this fall and we had the honor of interviewing him for volume 44. Kimball graduated from MSU with a degree in English education and has since gone on to do extraordinary things. He is the author of three novels: How Much of Us There Was, The Way the Family Got Away, and most recently an epistolary novel aptly titled Dear Everybody. His independent project, Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), is also proving to be very successful. Read the postcards at http://michael-kimball.com/blog.php.

RCR hosted three contests this fall and we couldn't be more excited about the winning entries, all of which are published at the end of this volume. Our Flash Fiction Contest was judged by Wilton Barnhardt, MSU alumnus and director of the Creative Writing Program at North Carolina State University. He's the author of Emma Who Saved My Life, Gospel, and Show World: A Novel. The Hemingway (Six-Word Story) Contest was judged by Martha Bates, acquisitions editor for the Michigan State University Press Books Division. Finally, our Haiku Contest was judged by Professor Anita Skeen. Professor Skeen is the director of the Poetry Center at MSU and longtime director of the Creative Arts Festival at Ghost Ranch Conference Center in Abiquiu, New Mexico. She's the author of four volumes of poetry, including Outside the Fold, Outside the Frame, The Resurrection of the Animals, and Portraits. We thank all the judges for their generosity, time, and assistance.

We have been lucky to edit RCR for two years and to have seen what a staff of 40 dedicated students can (and will) do to keep a literary journal going. We thank you for your nights spent reading and discussing manuscripts in a stuffy basement room. We could not produce such high quality issues without your flexibility, knowledge, laughter, and inspiration.

We leave you with volume 44 …

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

~ Henry David Thoreau