Editor’s Notes—Say Yes
Blood Orange Review 6.1

Here we are readers, at our unusual meeting ground, the editor’s notes, which means we editors have completed yet another issue of our journal and have officially entered our sixth year of publication. Welcome!

I would like to celebrate by congratulating our interns who have dedicated a part of their busy lives over the last year to help us sift through hundreds of submissions. We could not be more happy with their professionalism and their enthusiasm for our journal.

These students understand what it means to contribute to something larger than themselves; they know there are many editors who read dozens—or even hundreds of submissions—at a time, often for little or no financial gain. They comprehend patience; they have seen the issue you are currently reading come together slowly over time. They have witnessed good writing emerge and have participated in the body of work we call publishing.

While the managing editors read every submission and make all of the final decisions, the interns were the first to “say yes” to many of the writers featured in this issue. Sarah Moody, our newest intern, argued for Siobhan Casey’s “Bats in the Basement,” a poem filled with quiet language, yet propelled with striking force:

We like the dark

to go quiet       for the space
in our room to expand
before we have time

to rub our voices together
before the good-night

or good-bye

Deven Tokuno identified the strong lyrical quality in Brittany Perham’s “Hotel”: “Snow slips the roof so easily / you can imagine what it is like / to have never loved.”

Simmone Quesnell noted the hollow yet playful tone in Roger Bernard Smith’s poem “standstill”: “what if I said I’m not sorry but just scared and even that / will go away once there’s a familiar face facing me across / the table and when that’s gone I’ll begin being truly sorry.”

Our other interns have contributed as well; collectively they have read over 1,000 submissions in the last year. If you have had a chance to read our blog recently, you also noted that they attended the AWP conference in Washington, D.C. in February. You can read about their experiences in the blog post “Interns on the Scene.”

We are glad Blood Orange Review can serve as an educational tool for our interns and as a place where readers around the world can encounter high-quality literary work by contemporary writers.

Please join our interns in “saying yes” to issue 6.1!

Bryan Fry, co-editor
Blood Orange Review

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

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