Letter from the Editor

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So this is 2020, sprawling before us like the world’s most nerve-wracking installment of Choose Your Own Adventure, a thin path to salvation gently wending through the greater dread. Glenn Shaheen plunges headfirst into the horrors of the era with “Killing an American,” a homage to The Cure’s “Killing an Arab,” which took its own inspiration from The Stranger. It is in the midst of this textured meaning, of bursting egg sacs and a little bit of fear, that Shaheen writes, “Each American a stranger to me.” To us all, it seems.

Other contributors write of loss and reconciliation, the absence of loved ones still living, and those gone from this earth. In “Sitting in Silence with Lillian Dunn,” Sue Gano writes about therapy, the struggle to process trauma and to set it aside, to leave it alone. Frederick Ruf reckons with his past on another continent altogether. Walking the Camino in Spain, he considers a painful relationship with his sister, but also the way in which we humans experience our journeys and the greater stories of who we are.

This is a typically eclectic issue, spanning hexes to rehab robots, which is why we chose to make the cover this year a collage of three different artists’ work. Many thanks to Sage Perrott, Keya Tama, and Elléna Lourens for their contributions. Thanks as well to Jeffrey Peterson, our former poetry editor, who has a piece in this issue.

And finally, I owe everything to Sarah Kuhn, who has been the fiction editor since our nameless beginning, but who is departing this year following some very positive BIG LIFE CHANGES! Sarah, it won’t be the same without you, but we’ll try to keep things weird.

Our readers and contributors (probably you, huh?) are incredible. Thank you for your time, and enjoy the issue.

Craig Ledoux
Editor in Chief
Madcap Review