Welcome to our Winter 2020 issue, which marks the 5-year anniversary of Whale Road Review! We’re so thrilled to celebrate this milestone with the writers in this issue and to look back at the incredible work we’ve published since 2015. What an honor it is to get to do this work.
“Isolation is a sea in which we swim,” Luci Shaw’s poem in this issue begins, and many of these pieces take us into solitary spaces—a childhood closet used for hiding, a phone booth used for calling the dead—or bring us into intimate experiences of past connections that are no longer possible. They allow us to return to Eden more than once and to travel to Alabama, Bethlehem, Otsuchi, Taichung, and Washington when many of us have been unable to travel for months. A few of these pieces also made me laugh out loud, and I needed that too.
Issue 21 features poetry and short prose by Michael Akuchie, Dan Albergotti, Grace Bauer, Caroline Collins, Morgan Eklund, Jennifer Givhan, Shemaiah Gonzalez, Stephanie L. Harper, Jordan Hill, Tiffany Hsieh, Laurie Klein, Alea Marie, Libby Maxey, Matthew Miller, Maria S. Picone, Sara Quinn Rivara, Luci Shaw, Cathy Ulrich, Elinor Ann Walker, William Woolfitt, and Meg Yardley.
The pedagogy papers in this issue focus on process and revision. Thanks to Wendy Call, Brent House, and Adrian Markle for sharing their expertise!
Thanks also to John Brantingham, Jennifer Saunders, Rebecca A. Spears, Allison Backous Troy, and Lindsey Weishar for their engaging reviews of new poetry collections by Matt Sedillo, Sonia Greenfield, William Woolfitt, Ann Conway, and Cameron Morse.
As a special feature, this issue also includes an interview with Siân Griffiths about her new short story collection. Eliza Souers, Eric Van Gorden, Hannah Hicks, and Kailee Isham sent such a fantastic interview that we’ve officially added interviews to our submission guidelines, and we’d love to see more of them in our inbox.
Speaking of submissions, we’re now open again for the month of December, and we look forward to reading more poetry and short prose for our upcoming Spring and Summer 2021 issues.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoy this issue and are able, please tip the authors whose pages have a “Tip the Author” link under the bio. Please take good care and stay well!
Katie Manning
Editor-in-Chief