Issue 48 Foreword
Lauralee Leonard
Where does a story bring us? Where do we get to when we read a poem to its end for the first time, the second time, the third time? How is it that a person we are likely never to meet, through only words arranged on a page, can enter our consciousness so fully? And how does it happen that we surrender so completely to a created place that we are jolted, at the end, to find ourselves still in our own chair, suspended momentarily between worlds?
In our forty-eighth issue, Bellevue Literary Review is honored to present stories, essays, and poems from six contest winners as well as thirty other writers, each piece with the sure potential to bring a willing collaborator into a space created by another. We as readers are active in this magic; we engage with what is offered so that each journey through the pages is unique to us. And yet not so unique that when we do have an opportunity to connect—and exclaim, Yes, I read that too!—there is something collectively known that we are eager to share.
The winner of the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction is awarded to “The Veil Thins,” written by Fiona Ennis. Cited by our fiction judge Wayétu Moore for “its narrative strength and detail,” Ennis brings us into a world where faith and mystery entwine in the life of a young nun midwife whose personal experiences tug at church dogma. Set in Ireland at a time when the young sister wonders whether it is worse to be “caught on her bike in the country … or [be] seen in a car with a man,” she nonetheless allows her conscience to lead her through the night. The ministry she performs while acknowledging her lack of authority to do so brings solace to a patient who has found little peace.
The story chosen by Moore for Honorable Mention is “Bushmeat” by Chinaecherem Obor. Noted as “raw and beautiful” and “a stunning portrayal of the bewilderment that accompanies one’s negotiation of identity,” the story follows a young man as he braves a new world while carrying a family history he tries to keep like one of his suitcases, “unpacked and massive in a corner of the room.” The culture he has been transplanted into pushes in on him. “Is it an American pastime to hawk one’s embarrassments? To peddle the small tragedies of one’s life to strangers?” When he is finally “emboldened to confront the tyranny of my suitcase,” his memories “spill out like hard secrets.”
Through two exquisite poems selected by judge Leila Mottley, we are brought into an immediacy of experience that is the particular realm of poetry. “Cleaver,” written by Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador, was chosen as the winner of the John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry. Mottley describes “Cleaver” as “cutting in its brevity, slicing right to the heart of a poem that contends with violence, power, and family.” The narrator—“a witness of his violence//but a bearer of it too”—realizes, with an unnerving certainty “…to bear is itself // a way of devotion.”
The poem chosen by Mottley for Honorable Mention, “Hard to Face the Day,” was written by Cedric Rudolph. The poem, Motley observes, “channels the very rhythm it speaks about.” Through the skill of Rudolph, we are brought singing into the sacred fight to remain steady: “That church-boy rhythm might just save me // when I ain’t got no more.”
“Every Day Anew,” by Pia Jee-Hae Baur, is the winner of the Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction, chosen by Esmé Weijun Wang. “I dislike switching doctors,” the essay opens, laying out the stakes, “primarily because every time I have to recount my medical history, I have to decide how much I should lie.” Cited by Wang as “a perfect balance between sentimentality and restraint,” the essay probes a family secret so deeply held as to be nearly invisible: “I turned out normal, so normal that my parents were able to pretend nothing had ever happened.”
“Caged” was chosen by Wang for Honorable Mention in Nonfiction for “capturing both the challenge of living with a condition and the intricate tenderness of loving someone who shares it.” New to birding and a recent transplant to North Florida, the author Liesel Hamilton travels with her husband to Key West and, in an exotic bird sanctuary, comes upon a bird “so needy that if he’s not being held, he’ll release a deafening scream.” Hamilton recalls the caged parakeet her distant grandmother haphazardly kept, with “wood shavings and bird seed [that] leaked from its cage and covered the countertops, which were never disinfected before lunch was assembled.” After brief episodes of affection with the bird, “My grandmother would … shut the cage and disappear into her bedroom.” Hamilton begins to understand her grandmother differently, as one “who’d become disconnected because she had never figured out how to be.” And upon reflection, she notes, “I saw a version of myself, of who I might have become if I hadn’t learned the language of anxiety, mental health, therapy.”
To bring a story or a poem to the printed page is the result of many hands, but each piece begins in a place occupied by one soul empowered by a creative grace and a dedicated will. No one truly asks a writer to write a story, and yet countless stories have been written and told through the ages of humankind. We as readers come to this virtual feast of stories, ready to be brought into lives and into worlds that will bring us closer to each other and to ourselves. We thank our contributors and all those who have submitted their work to us, and our reviewers, who have helped us find the remarkable pieces you’ll read in the coming pages.
Special thanks to the patrons of BLR’s literary prizes—the Goldenberg family, the Buckvar family, and board members Lesmah Fraser and Linda C. Lombardi who support the John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry. Deep gratitude to our judges—Wayétu Moore, Leila Mottley, and Esmé Weijun Wang—for their care in selecting this year’s outstanding contest pieces. If you find yourself lost in a good way somewhere in these pages of BLR, then together we have succeeded in contributing to the wonder that is in the space between writers and readers.