"'Bats' is based on an actual experience. I live in Brooklyn, close to Prospect Park, and one summer day friends and I picnicked there until well after the sun set, and there were honest-to-goodness bats whirling around above us..."
The thing about this place is, we've got so d*mn much to do, and so few people to do it. Just look at those cobwebs that need to be cleaned off the window frames! Not to mention that stack of submissions that need to be read. Fortunately we've got another set of hands coming on board, as of now. Even more fortunately, they're the capable hands of Audrey Walls, our new assistant editor...
We've published more works by John Rybicki than by anyone else. He writes with both power and amazing versatility, drawing again and again on his own experience, from the joyous to the terrible, and coming up, each time, with something fresh, new, and raw. Nowhere is this more true than in the poems he wrote for and about Julia Moulds, his late wife, whose struggle with cancer defined their relationship from early on. Now those poems, some of whichfirst appeared right here, have been collected and published by Lookout, in When All the World Is Old...
For those of you who will be descending upon the decadence of Chicago for the upcoming AWP Conference (Feb 29 - March 3rd) we invite you for an evening of cheap drinks and free readings...
"... I was in fifth grade, and my mother took my me to the movies, something she never did back then. She believed in books, not theaters. But she said it would be good for me to understand communism, war, the Bolshevik Revolution...."
Anyway that's where we're headed this Christmas - off. We're hunkering down with a carton of smokes, and whatever we score from Loaded Santa. Back in the New Year, with... you know.
