From the Editor (Fall 2011)

Being on the Pitkin, I’m stunned at the variety of tastes, how one editor can be thrilled with a work and the next pass on it. Thinking, too, of all those authors that have saved my life, that, but for the grace of the universe, someone out there recognized that same rare necessity and published each book, each frail miracle that came alive in me, changed me, made me. I’ve come to love the vagaries of all our varied sensibilities among the Pitkin staff, the struggle, the opposing passions — what an impossible collaboration! and in this one sense, perhaps truly representative of the real world. What strange beasts we are as creative writers, and readers: utterly different, quirky, and yet, entirely the same. All the writers I’ve met and bonded with at Goddard! It’s the first time I’ve felt the deep undertow of community, finally coming home to be among my own.

As editor in chief, taking on that terrible bravura with each decision, of this not that, had particular weight and angst for me until someone shared this with me on my birthday, the evening before the Pitkin submissions deadline, pulling an all-nighter:

Science writer K.C. Cole asks this question: “How would you hold 100 tons of water in thin air
with no visible means of support?” Here’s her answer: “Build a cloud.” What you have before you
now, Leo, is a comparable scenario. Your assignment is to materialize a phenomenon that from
a certain viewpoint may appear to be laughably impossible. And yet, with the proper attitude on
your part and nature’s help,the project at hand is eminently achievable. It won’t necessarily be
fast and easy, mind you — but you wouldn’t want it to be, because then it wouldn’t be able to
teach you all the precious wisdom it has to impart. (Robert Brezny, Aug. 2011)

Not fast, not easy: you have in your hands a miracle, co-published by 45 indomitable, creative, full-time MFA writers who had little time for producing a literary journal in a few short months. Thank you to each and every member of the staff who made this happen — for our readers’ delight, showcasing a sampling of the best work of our peers — volunteering your time in the midst of, as we are all well aware, a ridiculously rigorous and exhaustive studio-academic regimen. Especial thanks to our gifted and tireless production editor, Kelsey Knoedler, and to the associate editors who early on threw it all in to give of themselves for a fully, mind-bendingly, overwhelmingly creative collaboration: Christa Harader and Kristy Harding. They were, in so many ways, co-editors-in-chief. Thank you both for your sacrifices in time, for the direct and intimate beauty of being shamelessly blunt and passionately never holding back, for your creative brilliance and vital energy that lifted this project towards pure joy — especially, as Brezny writes, for your “precious wisdom.”

This issue is one to read through, swallow in tastes and nibbles, or whole, the juices dripping off your chin…to happen upon that rare writer that takes you, down and down, then brings you back to who you are. Bon appetit.

Summer Graef

Editor in Chief