It’s not unusual for an issue to offer multiple angles on mortality. Whether exploring the mystery of fever and illness, violence in a synagogue, or a father or mother moving into the past tense, the pieces here frequently take on ultimate things through the earthy particular. They also offer corollary glimpses into the deep past or the infinite beyond, through mystical vision, historical documents, or surprising shifts in time. There are certainly other threads coursing through these pages—the streets of Berlin, dreams, and fable-like animal stories with foxes, okapi, and bears—but it’s mortality that’s coming to the fore for me, and not just on a personal level but through the lens of New England Review as an organization and as a collection of people.

This past July we lost three people important to NER: James Longenbach was a significant poet in our orbit, whose love for and knowledge of poetry’s craft and history radiated both from his books and from his person, something I witnessed multiple summers at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference where he taught. Jeff Cason, a professor, VP, and provost at Middlebury College, wasn’t well-known to our readers and writers, but he was a versatile and generous administrator whose vision for the college, and hard work on its behalf, included making room for NER within the greater mission of the institution. Lastly, and most personally to NER, Marcia Parlow Pomerance was our steadfast, beloved managing editor. She worked with every author who came through our pages from 2013 to 2021 and had a hand in solving every problem or challenge that arose during those years. All three of these people died in July 2022, in their early sixties, of cancer and its complications. 

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Marcy Pomerance had two old plush chairs in her office. She called them “the green chairs,” but they had faded in the sun over so many years in her mother’s Boston apartment that they were really more of a gold tone. Only if you flipped the cushions over could you see the original green and its once-velvety texture. “I think it’s time for a green chair moment,” Marcy would say when something was too complicated for the usual standing-in-the-doorway conversation. This might involve brainstorming a new story title when the author was stymied, sorting out a technical problem with an order form, or reviewing whatever had transpired over the weekend.  

Some of what transpired over the weekends during those years were profound life events—the decline and death of parents, divorce, a child’s adolescence, national and political tragedies, crises of self-doubt, cancer, coronavirus. The kind of things that can consume a person, make concentration difficult, make day-to-day life seem meaningless. But after some time in the green chairs I’d walk away with more equanimity and focus, in part because that conversation might also end with a note about a bobcat she’d spotted in the backyard, the current state of peaches at the co-op, or what one of her three amazing sons was up to. But also because Marcy had a gift for perspective. She could take the long view even in the most overwhelming situations without ever belittling the difficulty of the present.

During staff meetings in the green chairs with Eli Sutton, the three of us would solve problems, set priorities, divide labor, and inevitably laugh enough to feel physically more ready to take on whatever came next. There are no literary emergencies, we’d remind ourselves, even when it felt like there might be. What seemed more important to remember was that we were working in service of something we cared about, something we held sacred even. And weren’t we lucky every day to be doing so?

Ben Miller, a writer we published several times while Marcy was managing editor, was moved to write a letter to her family after she died and to share it with me. He noted her “pristine precision, a coach’s talent for encouragement, patience to deal with any and all questions, plus a generosity which imbued every exchange . . . Always there was a person evident—a lively humanity to appreciate—behind even our most commonplace exchanges.” He said, “I can’t be the only author who noticed this, or feels the way I do. Consider these comments to be choral.”

Jennifer Chang, who published her poems in NER years before becoming our poetry editor, said, “Each time I worked with her I was so moved by her enthusiasm for my work and the work she was doing at NER, and those experiences increased the sense of honor I felt about publishing in the journal. How rare is it to feel genuine joy from a managing editor and over email? I loved her and I’d never even met her. I’m very sorry she’s not here to keep cheering us on.” Our fiction editor Ernest McLeod noted her “genuine sense of warmth and support” and how “her thoughtfulness carried through all her work at NER.”

Marcy loved the work, she loved being alive, and she hated to leave. She took the green chairs with her, but so much that she gave will continue to reveal itself as time passes without them, without her. The same can be said of all three of our recent losses. Their legacies are in poems and essays, in programs and policies, and in the pages and archives of the New England Review, but most of all they’re present in those who knew them. 

It only occurs to me now that the chair I recently brought into my own office is gold plush. Maybe this was one way I’d subconsciously devised to keep Marcy near. Maybe if I’m lucky it will eventually turn green, or better, become a place for future green chair moments. 

—CK

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