Editor's Note-Volume 31.1

Editor's Notes

I would like to thank the many Patrons, Donors, Supporters, and Friends for their generous monetary contributions – as well as all our institutional subscribers. As with most small arts organizations, REAL works under a limited budget, so we greatly appreciate your support.

Thanks also to my staff. Dr. John A. McDermott, Director of SFA’s Creative Writing Program and Fiction Editor, has been pivotal in making this one of the strongest fiction issues so far. The Fiction Staff of Dr. Michael J. Martin, Assistant Fiction Editor, as well as Ms. Amy Collins and Ms. Nicole Hacker, graduate students in Creative Writing, were central to the process in choosing the fiction from our many submissions and making sure those stories were passed on to John. We were also assisted in the reading of manuscripts by Br. Mercy Cannon, Ben Rutledge, and the ceaselessly energetic Ryan Stone. Without Dr. Cannon, Mr. Rutledge, and especially Mr. Stone, we would have been simply overwhelmed. Ms. Jane Robinson in the Dean’s Office is to be commended for her various efforts in keeping the magazine running and for handling our supply demands.

I would also like to personally that Dr. McDermott, Martin, and Cannon – and particularly Ms. Collins and Ms. Hacker – for all their practical and moral support. Whether this included packaging envelopes, logging submissions, running to the mailbox, creating charts, or brainstorming how to make the magazine function more smoothly, I am ever grateful for all assistance from them. I would also like to that Michael S. Manley, editor of Rain Crow Publishing, photographer John Urban (http://www.urbanphotoco.com), Dr. Matthew Ramsey of the English department, and Ms. Heather Hilliard for their advice and opinions on various matters of concern to the magazine.

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Matthew Batt, our new Creative Nonfiction professor at SFA, to his role as Creative Nonfiction Editor. We know he will be an exciting addition to both our growing B.FA. and M.A. programs, and also to the magazine as well.

This issue was never intended as a theme issue, but once together, we discovered that many of the stories and poems deal with emotional claustrophobia and the desire to break free of that containment. Thus, the contents work in tandem with Ben McCooks’s haunting cover photo, “A Study of Thread.” We are especially grateful to all the writers included here, who were so gracious to share their work with us.

Finally, special apologies to poet Jason Tandon, whose poem “Lamb’s Grove, Iowa” was misprinted in our previous issue. The version of the poem in Volume 30.2 is missing a crucial line. You’ll find the correct version of Mr. Tandon’s poem on page 62 in this issue. We appreciate his patience and understanding regarding the error.

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Stephen F. Austin State University

Editor's Notes