Foreword

Foreword We are happy to present in this issue the winners of the 7th annual Editors' Prize, including the first winner of the Larry Levis Prize in Poetry. Larry, a co-founder of The Missouri Review, was beloved by many students and friends, who have cooperated generously to make the Levis Prize possible. Michael Pettit's winning selection of poems, as it happens, shares with much of Larry's work, an atmospheric melancholy, a subtle sense of humor, and a capacity for word intoxication. This year's Editors' Prize winner in fiction, Alice Fulton, is also primarily known as a poet. Fulton's winning "Happy Dust" is a brilliant , historically authentic portrait of an Irish immigrant in New York in the early twentieth century, a sickly, hard-working young woman with a rock-solid character and a scintillating view of the world. Pregnant with her fifth child, faced with dangers both obvious and unobvious, she may or may not make it through this birthing. It's an old-fashioned story in some ways, full of memorable characters, including a friend who is poisoning herself for beauty, a nun who suffers for Christ, and a kindly but misguided doctor who dispenses the latest powerful painkiller (heroin powder) to alleviate the pregnant woman's symptoms. Alice Fulton mentioned to me that she wrote "Happy Dust" as a daughter trying to imagine her own mother's birth and something of her grandmother's life. It shares with a number of other pieces in the issue an interest in the subject of daughters, young women who are tryingto createanidentity, orreach a stage oflife,whilestillin the orbit of their families. I have a daughter who is fifteen, and I sometimes feel like I am holding onto her coattails as she tumbles through the stages of growing up. I know that she will "soon" be gone, that those three years of high school will flash by like a passing train. In his essay "Wide Awake," DeWitt Henry describes parenting from the perspective of the often unsure and awkward father. But what is it like for the daughters? Several of the writers in this issue describe it from the inside. Susan Vreeland's "A Night Different From All Other Nights," uses the unmentioned future better than any story I've ever read. Set in Europe on the verge of World War II, it concerns a daughter who isn't appreciated within her family because of her shyness. She has not yet found her role, but as the crisis outside their home deepens she grows up before our eyes, cohering with exactness and majesty. Ashley Clifton's delicate "West" is also about a girl in the first stage of independence , in her case from an oddball mother. Jocelyn Bartkevicius's Editors' Prize winning essay, "Out of the Garden," describes a daughter growing up in classic American circumstances , born into an immigrant family, trying to make sense of influences from the past, including a grandmother who continues her peasant ways in industrial Connecticut and a father who takes up the dream of escaping to a refuge in the forest. In the essay "Dangerous Men," Carol Cloos takes a clear-eyed and refreshing look at the sensuousness that she learned from men and boys growing up in a farming community. Willa Rabinovitch's story "Steal Away" depicts a middle-class San Francisco girl slipping away from her comfortable home for trysts with her first lover and her first lesson in betrayal. Cintia Santana's 'To Love Big Dog" also concerns a young woman's first love, wrong-headed by any obvious measure, and it shares with Rabinovitch's story a sense of the learning—and the living—that one experiences even while making mistakes. Interviewed by Kay Bonetti and Walter Bargen, Andrei Codrescu— poet, essayist, novelist, and radio commentator—talks in his inimitably deadpan style about immigrating with his mother to this country from Romania at nineteen, learning English, meeting and being inspired by the work of Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets, as well as about such things as the destructive potential of bad poetry. This issue of The Missouri Review celebrates the conclusion of a thirteen -year drive...