Editor’s Note

This note is chock full of announcements. I feel like the cows I once saw hurrying over an unfenced field toward a road. At the edge of the field, needing to cross the road, they stopped and bellowed, like buglers announcing the arrival of a magnificent guest. Here is my portentous bugle.

This issue carries the award-winning selection in our annual Editors’ Prize contest, judged this year by Jocelyn Bartkevicius. The winning essay is “Swim, Memory,” by Megan Nix, which depicts the prelude to and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Here is what Jocelyn says about it:

Never sentimental, the essayist nevertheless creates scenes about animals, people, and place with a sensitivity tempered by subtle irony. The writer has an original voice, an eye for crackling detail and surprising juxtapositions, and a remarkable way of working reflection and fact into a story about the chaos and confusion of fleeing and returning to tragedy.

This annual prize is now known as the Michael Steinberg Essay Prize, honoring the vision and dedication of Fourth Genre’s founding editor. It is fitting that Michael Steinberg will be the judge of the contest for 2010.

In this issue appears the third installment of a relatively new feature in the journal, Essay and Self-Reflection, which pairs a creative work with the author’s discussion of its creation and method. (In our previous issue, Joy Castro mused on the stages of composing her spare and powerful lyric essay “Grip.”) Here Alison Thomas, a newcomer to our pages, joins to her essay “Telescope to the Sky” the self-reflective “In the Elephant Room,” attending in particular to the matter of third-person narration. The evidence of our submissions inbox suggests that it is becoming more common for creative texts not to say “I,” a development that makes her remarks especially timely.

In this issue begins another ongoing feature in Fourth Genre: Writer as Reader. The inaugural item in this series is Joe Bonomo’s “Seams, Hinges, and Other Disclosures,” which explores the influence of Patricia Hampl’s “Parish Streets,” from Virgin Time, upon his development as an essayist. Essays in the Writer as Reader series respond to creative nonfiction that has influenced the author’s own writing, that the author has reevaluated over time, or that is widely influential. Essays in this series tell a story about the author’s relationship with one particular work, perhaps one that is challenging because of its form, innovation, content, history, or politics. For a complete description, see the submission guidelines that follow this note.

In addition to a lineup of varied new essays and memoirs, this issue offers a substantive interview with Robin Hemley, who, as director of the MFA Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, has a finger on the pulse of recent developments in literary nonfiction. We are also able to pair a review of Donald Morrill’s new essay collection, Impetuous Sleeper, and an essay from that collection, “saccades.”

In short, sound a bellowing bugle!