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Editorial Comment Highlights
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| Issue 29: a number that invites
both looking back and looking forward. Twenty-nine
is about transition, a turning point, a cusp.
At a recent meeting of the editors, a day-long
meeting where we read over and edited the whole
manuscript--which at 130 pages is one of the
largest we've ever published--one of us mentioned
how hard it was to believe we'd undertaken this
process twice a year for fourteen and a half
years. Statistics like these have a way of seducing
us. They invite storytelling, which is obviously
what we love. |
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This year, we recevied
a plethora of good fiction, so much that we
were very hard-pressed to select what to publish.
Like the number 29, many of these stories
are about turning points. As one writer puts
it, why write about this particular moment,
this particular day? Most of these stories
intrinsically answer this question: a small
thing--an orange peel under a bedsheet, a
wandering neighbourhood cow--triggers a life-chagning
experience.
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| Poetry, too
often homes in on a moment of perception or
change as Richard Harrison so articulately
discusses in this issue. Finally, although
we haven't changed our mandate to publish
exclusively writers between the ages of thriteen
and nineteen, we have made an exception with
the poem "First Raven" by Gabriel
Wainio-Théberge, who is, at age ten,
the youngest poet we've ever published in
The Claremont Review. The astonishing
clarity and beauty of this poem both belies
and attests to the youth of this talented
young poet.
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