When I wrote the following "Editor's Note" for the very first issue of my magazine, Santa Fe Literary Review, I now realize I was setting down my writing manifesto as well.
It's time for a return to a literature of meaning - stories and poems that we can sink our teeth into, food that fuels our thoughts and sparks our conversations into the stuff of which salons are made.
And that's what literature has always done: made us think, given us the opportunity to move beyond the narrow confines of our known world. We birth ourselves into new being with every piece of literature we read. But for some reason, this art's being allowed to die in this country. For too long now, we've seen works that attempt to duplicate what movies and television give us. This overlooks entirely the power of the written word. Unlike movies or TV, literature is a participatory art. We don't just watch like voyeurs peeping through the windows of strangers, we crawl through the window and live for a time in the world created by the author. We taste and touch and smell and hear and see and feel with our emotional bodies what it's like to be someone else. We walk for more than a mile in another's moccasins - something that film, by its very nature, will never invite us to do.
But what of contemporary stories - do they? So many of them seem to be academic exercises, perfectly crafted, but lacking the life found in the much-Iess-than-perfect stories of some of the masters of the art. Think of Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." Who would publish it today? And yet, it's haunted many of us for years, like a dream we once had or a memory of an experience that sifts into consciousness in odd moments.
That, to me, is what makes a story good. Not that it's perfect, not even that it's skillfully rendered. No, sometimes those things get in the way of evoking what every writer must evoke in the reader: the dream. What makes a story good for me is that I can't quite shake it, it keeps coming back unbeckoned. It lives inside of me for months or years. Its images tangle into the web of my life so inextricably that, yes, they haunt me.
That's the basis on which I chose the stories and poems in this first issue: they all have haunted me for months or years. I'm happy, too, with these works because none is what I call "cookie cuttered," the stamp of too much that's written and published today. Herein you'll find variety: not one is like another; each bears the mark of the unique voice that brought it to life. With luck, you'll find a little eccentricity here, too, for as John Stuart Mill said in On Liberty:
Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor; and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of our time.
Vive la difference!
© 1991, 1993 by Colleen Mariah Rae
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