Foreword

Foreword Writers have won The Missouri Review Editors' Prize at different stages in their writing lives, but we have noticed that historically they tend to be in early career. We've always thought of "career" as independent of age, since some of our best first or early-career pieces are written by authors who are not young. One of the things I enjoy about working on the magazine is finding out about the identities of the writers we publish. They often surprise you: a voice that is terribly mature may come from a young writer, or one that is wayward and agile may be from someone middle-aged or older. A white writer can sound black. A woman can sound like a man. The voice in one story we took was so believably boylike that I was sure we were accepting a piece from a brilliant schoolchild, only to discover he was a sophisticated adult who wrote in all kinds of voices. To me, it's a cheery thing, this sharing of voices, this ventriloquism, this ability to imagine oneself in the shoes of another. A voice "in the groove," wholly convincing—this is one of the things I live for as a reader. Something else about the contest I noticed this year was how many submissions we received from people working in the publishing industry , all happily making use of their magazine's or pubUshing house's envelopes. Multinational publishing conglomerates, beware: the extremely well-educated young people whom you are paying $21,000 a year to slave away at your profit centers are stealing envelopes to enter literary contests. (Literary? What's literary? Find out who's stealing those New Yorker 9" X 12" envelopes!) The young and starving on the coasts, the sixty-somethings, the middle -aged and yearning, the writing program kids, a few big names—aU were among the entrants this year, and aU were treated equaUy. Yes, it seUs magazines to have weU-known writers plastered on the cover, but we have also noticed that when literary magazines pubUsh only well-known writers, it is a very good bet that those magazines are being poorly edited. They are publishing advertisable names rather than content and thus have forfeited their principal advantage as noncommercial magazines. I get testy about weU-funded nonprofit organizations that give prizes and awards only to the already severely bemedaled "safe" writers—the second Ueutenants of Uterature—who stagger from one writers' conference to the next. Although this isn't the case with all of the nonprofits, there are some egregious examples—organizations run by time-servers who either have no confidence in their opinions or perhaps don't have any opinions of their own. We relish discovery. We are delighted when agents and publishers call, as they do after every issue, asking how to get in touch with our writers. Yes, we say, love to give you their addresses. That's what we're here for. The content of this issue, though—I just don't know. We have tried to put the best face on things and make it sound highbrow, or at least neutral-brow, by calling it "altered states," but as far as I'm concerned it might as well be called the WEIRD issue or the STRANGE TALES issue. "Altered states" is a little bogus, come to think of it, given the fact that the altering of states is a bit like E=mc2 of literature. You can pretty much count on it: the story doesn't start until a change occurs; the poem is made possible when something is perceived anew. But there is some peculiar stuff in these pages—ghosts, bizarre life changes, shadowy mysteries. Emily Pease's Editors' Prize-winning story, "Tad Lincoln's Ladder of Dreams," is narrated by a ghost, the dead younger son of President and Mrs. Lincoln—a fitting voice for the scary tale ofa family stalked by death. As well as anything I've read about the subject, Pease's story offers insights into the martyrdom of the Lincolns to illness, war, murder, and madness. Stephanie Rosenfeld and Michael Byers are two pokerfaced comic writers. In Rosenfeld's...