Editors’ Page

With winter’s snow and spring’s chilly rain now long behind us, we can exhale and settle into summer, a time when the world outside, in all its verdant splendor and warmth, opens up again and invites us to engage with it: we open the windows, we eat outdoors, we may even sleep outdoors. The quintessential image of summer for many of us is stretching out with some fabulously long book under the generous shade of a tree.

A desire for connection with the natural world frames this issue’s short stories: with minerals, volcanoes, sand, sea, wind, and, perhaps most especially, little terriers. Leticia, the title character of Yalitza Ferreras’s “The Letician Age,” is driven by a lifelong fascination with the wonders of geology, leading to both her success and peril. The daughter of back-to-the-landers hopes to reconnect with her partner by taking her on a camping trip in Elisabeth Hamilton’s “Homesteaders.” And Jenny Irish’s heartbreaking “I Am Faithful” explores the profoundly intense relationship between humans and dogs.

In nonfiction, we have three essays that concern memory. In “Counterclockwise,” Jennifer Anderson examines the moment her life divided into before and after—and discovers that her memory of it is not quite accurate. Melissa Ferrone’s dreamlike meditation “Blood and Stars” braids together childhood fears, mythology, astronomy, and personal and communal memories of her hometown of Manassas, Virginia. And Mason Stokes sifts through memories and mementoes of his uncle, trying to discern whether they shared something more significant, more poignant, than just their first name in “Namesake.”

And we are very pleased to be featuring the first chapter of Lori Ostlund’s forthcoming novel, After the Parade (Scribner), published here as “Passing through Needles,” in which we meet Aaron, who is leaving his partner of twenty years and not getting an easy start on his journey west to begin a new life. Watch for the release in September; it won’t be too late to find the perfect tree, leaves just beginning to turn, the heat relenting just a bit, under which you can recline and savor the rest of Ostlund’s debut novel.

Welcome to the summer issue.

—stephanie g’schwind

A friend who lives in Ghana once told me that she has always been amazed by “Americans and their summers.” She said, “You talk about your summer all the time. In your movies. In your novels. In your chatter. Summer. Summer. Summer. That great long stretch of splendid summer.” She said one of the things that marked her understanding of American summers was that this was a time we dedicated to travel and adventure. This great, long, splendid summer issue of Colorado Review will provide plenty of opportunities for adventure.

Look for translations of three Uruguayan poets (Victoria Estol, Javier Etchevarren, and Paola Gallo) and the Brenda and Helen Hillman translation of the Brazilian poet Ana Cristina César. Travel back in time via Andrew Grace’s “John Henry Split My Heart,” Laura-Gray Street’s “Survey of Worker Engagement,” and James Hoch’s “The Pine Barrens: A Sermon.” Read the poem D. M. Aderibigbe sent from Nigeria and the poems Lucy Anderton sent from France. Look for Joelle Biele’s postcards and Lauren Crux’s rambles. Look for Kazim Ali’s “Orange Alert,” Kate Asche’s “Incoming,” and Hala Alyan’s “Transatlantic.” Or fire up the grill in your own backyard, as Sally Keith, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Roger Reeves, Michael Pontacoloni, and Freya Rohn have done.

Before my friend mentioned it, I hadn’t thought of summer as a particularly American institution. I hadn’t thought of summer like I think of barbeque, for instance. Barbeque as we experience it—often during our American summers—is an invention of Henry Ford and his cousin-in-law E. G. Kingsford. Ford, wanting a way to put the wood scraps from the production of his automobiles to use, created a charcoal company. Buy a Model T, and you were likely to get a bag of charcoal in the deal. People cook meat over fire all around the world, but America invented a particular style of barbeque. One...