Issue 50 Foreword
Danielle Ofri
Welcome to the 50th issue of Bellevue Literary Review! It seems hard to believe, but BLR is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. We certainly weren’t thinking in terms of a silver jubilee back when this all started, with a wisp of an idea about creative writing on health, illness, and healing. But these themes are universal, and using the arts to grapple with our shared vulnerabilities turned out to be a prescription that resonates with an ever-growing community.
We are excited to share this special year with our readers. All year long we’re digging back through our archives to highlight past issues of BLR in our weekly newsletters, featuring some of the most memorable poems, stories, and essays that have appeared in our pages. We’re launching a slate of new programs to invite the broader community to engage directly our themes, including Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare, Art in Medicine, Writing Illness onto the Page, as well as a book club and a writing studio.
The journal, however, remains at our core and shepherding a new crop of writings onto the page is one of the greatest pleasures of the editorial team. Even after fifty issues, the excitement of reading and selecting work for each issue hasn’t waned. And when these poems, essays, and stories come together in the finished issue—well, to an editor, there’s nothing better.
Issue 50 includes the winners of the annual BLR Literary Prizes, which attracted a wealth of impressive writing. Joan Silber, the judge for the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, selected “The Senator” by Shannon Perri as the winner. In a story that manages to be unsentimental and even humorous at times, a mother lands upon an unusual metaphor for her brain tumor as she debates how to tell her toddler. In May Lee-Yang’s Honorable Mention story, “Hunting Game,” two young women participate in a college “game” that simulates the harrowing escape from Laos of their parents’ generation.
The nonfiction judge, Nicole Chung, chose “Running Deep,” by Won Lee, as the winner of the Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction. A family navigates the unsettling waters of a mother with failing kidneys, never sure when the end might be near. Honorable Mention goes to “The Last Tableau,” by Ardis Garcia, which follows a woman who has returned to a home of conflicted memories to care for her dying father and ill mother.
The John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry was judged by Patricia Spears Jones. The winning poem, “Telling the Bees” by Dara Laine, moves fluidly from personal to familial to ecological: “Maybe they knew before we did. Maybe they felt it. When the line flattened. The air static. / Maybe grief hums at a pitch only bees can hear.” Honorable Mention was awarded to Miranda Saake’s “Stinson Beach,” a moving poem of parents bringing their son with leukemia to the beach: “I was trying / to recreate trips from before he was sick, / flinging himself into frigid water /on a beach so full of bleached driftwood /we believed in a kingdom of /bones.”
We recognize that BLR writings engage directly with experiences of illness, loss, suicide, and the realities of the body in ways that may be intense or affecting for some readers. We hope you will find meaning and resonance in the stories, essays, and poems contained herein.
Our thanks to the judges, the writers, and the dedicated BLR friends who sponsor our annual literary prizes—the Goldenberg family (fiction), the Buckvar family (nonfiction), and the Leslin Healthcare Leadership Foundation, which underwrites the Allman Poetry Prize. And of course the biggest thanks goes to you, our readers, who form the backbone of the BLR community. We are thrilled to share this 25th anniversary with you!