Once, years ago, New England Review’s editor Carolyn Kuebler described to me the process of organizing a single issue of the magazine, of deciding in what order the pieces we’d accepted should finally appear. At the time, this was not a problem I’d ever thought about before. Fiction writers like me don’t deal that often with the question of how to sequence different pieces of writing. Literary magazine editors, by contrast, confront it every single quarter. 

What Carolyn told me on this occasion, as I remember it, was that she thought putting together an issue was akin to composing a musical phrase. Although she knew this was by no means typical, she pictured a reader who would read the entire issue through from beginning to end, like a book. She wanted such a reader to experience satisfying and meaningful connections, resonances, and echoes as they went along. She also wanted there to be changes in tone and register between pieces. But these shifts should be pleasing, not jarring. New England Review doesn’t usually solicit writing around a particular topic, but she noted that recurring themes nevertheless always emerge from the aggregated work—a phenomenon I’ve also noticed in my now six years of reading for the magazine. Perhaps this unintentional coherence shouldn’t be surprising. Writers, for all our many crucial differences, are responding to the same interconnected world where certain events and forces touch nearly everyone, albeit in very disparate ways. In any case, I’ve thought often since then about the issue as a musical composition. I thought about it when I was arranging my own story collections. And I thought about it when I came to mull over what to say about the issue you have in your possession now.

If you took that consecutive journey from beginning to end of this current iteration of New England Review, what contrasts and connections would you find? What themes would come to light? You’d start with Liana Kapelke-Dale’s translations of poems by Peruvian poet Blanca Varela, which are dizzying in their inversions of the reader’s expectations, since surely summer is bright not black, the blackest, as the poet contends. From there, you’d launch directly into Rachel Greenley’s haunting essay “Here in Umatilla,” about touring a decommissioned chemical depot as the writer wrestles with her inherited assumptions about growth, development, and ownership in a western landscape marred by native dispossession and threatened by climate change. Next you’d find yourself picking up the morning mail with the narrator of Jessica Treadway’s short story “Tribute,” only to learn that the beloved, admired oncologist who administered her cancer treatment is now terminally ill herself. After that, Michael Robins’s poems about love would trouble the boundaries between the living and the dead. And Lindsay Hill’s excerpts from Tidal Lock would introduce you to the narrator’s difficult friend, who lives on society’s margins, ignoring eviction notices and living quite literally off scraps. 

Already, after reading just this first handful of works, some keynotes seem to have appeared. Things that looked solid and sure—national mythologies, presumed good health—turn out to be unstable and ephemeral. But these essays, poems, and stories also collectively suggest you still have to try to find your way amidst all the confusion. One thing which can sometimes help you do that are the works of art you love, and if you read on, you’d find this idea taken up, first in Robert Stothart’s essay “La Huida a Egipto,” an exploration of the writer’s early, fierce attachment to the santos of New Mexican folk art, and then again in Jehanne Dubrow’s “Red Monsters,” which weaves together memories of the writer discovering her own complex, elusive sexuality with readings of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. Further on, in “Before / After Paris,” Ben Ren finds an analog for his post-COVID disorientation in Monet’s iconic waterlilies. And in an altogether more irreverent vein, the washed-up screenwriter protagonist of Lou Mathews’s “Desperate Times, Desperate Crimes” gropes his way forward via a proposed remake of a schlocky B-movie from the ’70s, which this time, he is sure, can be done right.

Another possible guidepost in perplexity can be, of course, love of other people, other living things. But this is complicated because those objects are threatened and do not last. In Christine Grillo’s story “Kill Your Lawn,” a landscape architect finds new romance while rescuing rare plants from destruction, though how long either the love or the salvation will endure remains unclear. In Joseph De La Torre’s story “What Brothers Get,” two siblings reunite after years of separation. Will they find their way back to their former closeness? Or will new class and cultural divides keep them awkward and estranged? Meanwhile, Craig Morgan Teicher writes about the mother he lost in childhood, and Judith Claire Mitchell keeps a list of all the things that pass away in her essay titled—what else?—“Ephemerals.” 

There is much more remarkable writing in this issue which I haven’t even touched on here. And of course, you’ll make your way through this collection of works as you see fit. No way of reading is necessarily preferable to any other. However you decide to proceed, you’ll find something here that’s far more than the sum of its already extraordinary parts. I hope the combination will impress you, as in, I hope that it will leave its mark. It does on me. Every time.

—Emily Mitchell, fiction editor 

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