Foreword

Foreword We focus in this issue on several themes—love, fatherhood, sexual identity, aging, war—from men's perspectives. Davis McCombs' sonnet sequence "Ultima Thule" portrays one man's intense curiosity about the world and his desire to explore undiscovered country despite the severe limitations of his life. The hero of the sequence is the historically based Stephen Bishop, a black slave who became famous in the 1830s as the man who mapped and led tours through Mammoth Cave. McCombs' poetry has the sound of a major voice in the making, and we are happy to announce him as a Missouri Review McAfee Discovery poet. AU of the fiction in this issue is either a first published story or an early publication by the author, and as a group it is our best fiction collection in some time—an opinion shared by all of us. As editors we live to find this quality of work and seldom have so much of it in one issue. "Monastic Ruins" by Bill Embly is a novella, a genre that has been virtually abandoned by periodicals, including our own, because of space constraints. Set in rural Ireland, the story concerns an epistolary relationship between an American and his young Irish landlady. Beneath its deceptively quiet surface is an absorbing tale of a romance kindled by confession and shared sensibilities and the magic of distance. Three of our stories chronicle important passages in men's lives: Ron Nyren's "Ordinary Apples" narrates a high school love affair and its surprising meaning to a teenager who has only recently achieved full sexual maturity. Peter Walpole's "Distant Lights in the Foothills Beyond Owari-Efci" recounts the last run of a train engineer before his retirement. William Gay's "Those Deep Elm Brown's Ferry Blues" is an elegantly written depiction of a man who still has his strength but is losing his wits. Gay's story, the first one he has published, demonstrates how curiously exhilarating a truly well-written tragedy can be. Two of the pieces in this issue are set during wars. British writer Henry Shukman's "Mortimer of the Maghreb" is about a war correspondent at the ragged edge of middle age and a life of excess; with his career in decline, he is trying to renew himself in the middle of danger, his old venue, in Saharan North Africa. Otis Haschemeyer's nonfiction "The Storekeeper" is set in another desert war, the Gulf War, and portrays the first kill by a U.S. Navy SEALS sniper. Haschemeyer's essay relives both how the sniper was trained and how he fell into this assignment. Along with poet Gary Fincke, Tom Ireland is one of our repeatappearance authors. In his essay "Fianchetto," Ireland describes his relationship with his daughter at the time in her life when she achieves full independence. "Fianchetto" (titled after a chess move) is partly an account of the little-remarked way in which a parent may take pride in a grown child's intellectual dissimilarity from him and his generation. In Gary Pacernick's interview of Harvey Shapiro, the straight-shooting poet and New York Times Magazine senior editor talks about the relationship between writing and editing. Shapiro was a B-17 gunner in World War II, and he too speaks of the effects of war and how it is something that he has had to continue living with and living through. Our feature piece is a selection of letters exchanged between two American literary giants, Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Perm Warren. Porter was a flamboyant personality and a writer's writer, with a modest but exquisite output in fiction, while Warren became the epitome of the twentieth-century man of letters. Warren not only wrote poetry, fiction, and criticism but wrote what are generally regarded as classic works in all three. These letters cover the key time when Warren acted as co-editor of The Southern Review, helping give voice to serious literature that might otherwise have been lost in the era of rising commercialism in publishing. The letters between these two offer an interesting look into the lives of two important American authors in the turbulent early...