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Editor's Introduction Laura C. Tisdel I live with two third-year medical students on surgery rotation, and each night they regale me with stories of re-attaching fingets, the stink of cutting open a patient with gangrene, and near-fatal gun shot wounds that they cauterized shut. They are like starry eyed kindergarteners fresh offthe school bus from their first day, only every giddy anecdote they tell carries with it the urgency, the importance, of life and death decision. In the presence of their daily achievements I often find myselfhesitant to share: the light through the halfwindows ofthe basement office drapes across my computer screen as Iskim furtively through Chicago Manual of Style andfind to my delight that, yes, a semicolon is needed'. As my housemates chatter on, stethoscopes swinging around their necks and hands buried deep in their white lab jackets, I stare tragically into the pile ofsubmissions I am reading and feel my gut sink. Is what I am doing, editing a literary magazine, studying literature as an English major, vital? The image of my housemate thawing out frostbitten toes in the emergency room brought to mind radio essayist Katie Davis's description ofher stories about Adams Morgan, Washington D.C. as an attempt to "create an anatomy of the neighborhood"—there is a creation, or at least a re-animation , in writing that is medicinal, healing. No matter the subject, writers unify or reclaim a body. They grab scraps that seem irreconcilable and coax them to adhere. A severed hand floating unattached in space is not nearly as poignant as the hand that reaches out for you from a graceful arm, just as die hills ofBerkeley were never as sensuous as they are when conjoined with the image of a curve in a lover's hips, as in "Before Daylight Hits the Bay" by poet Courtney Chapin. The surgeon sets the clavicle bone at the perfect angle to the rib or grafts thigh skin to face seamlessly and the body is made whole again; the writer sees a tear—an awkward silence in conversation or a glance of longing—and she writes in the missing pieces, reconciles the moment to itself. Amy Sumerton unravels the tensions between nanny and working mother in "Vicarious Motherhood," and suddenly the anatomy of that relationship is recognizable, nameable, and whole. As a babysitter, I read that piece and my role fell into place: where I saw frustrating amputations in 2 IAURA C. TISDEL logic ( the mother is short with me about the cluttered playroom and doesn 't notice I made dinner) I see a solid trajectory; I understand and I sympathize . A well-written piece has the surgical precision to connect action to motive, to reconnect a reader to her childhood, her job, her family; to heal her in a way that no anti-biotic can. This issue ofRed Cedar Review also begins to map out the anatomy ofa writing community. The mission oíRed Cedar Review has long been to cultivate a community ofwriters in East Lansing, and, for our editors, to cultivate a sense responsibility to that community. The vast majority ofpieces in this issue are local finds—the editors put out their feelers and came back to me with award winning undergraduate wotk, with short stories by alums and grad students, and with student cover art. Our authors may have sat beside each odier in coffee shops or walked past each other on the way to class but are finally linked together in the pages of Red Cedar Review. The work of local authors has been grafted to submissions that the edits sifted from the submissions box and, although the work may have come to us from distant points, it resonated, was as familiar to us as our own hand. I find excitement in all ofthis and in thatway this issue bears my mark. As General Editor I've tried to transmit my sense of happy anticipation, my feeling of being the cartographer of new terrain, to my staff. Each poem or story we accept is a discovery, and when we can see where it clicks into the big picture of our issue I glean something like...

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