Dear Readers,

With this issue—our fourth!—we mark a whole year of The Swannanoa Review. Whether you’ve been with us since the beginning or you’re discovering us now for the first time: thank you. It’s a privilege, perhaps now more than ever, to receive, share, and celebrate writers and their work. 

In our last letter we wrote of Hurricane Helene's devastation of Swannanoa (and beyond), and in the time since then we've seen what feels at times like an unending barrage of catastrophic headlines.

It seems worth noting that we received more submissions to this issue than any other, which we take as a sign that—regardless of what else might be going on—we are all turning to the arts and forms of expression and emotional communication we hold dear, and maybe even more now than before. 

We are excited to include a wide range of modes here: from Alyssa Beckitt's head-on sequence of poems detailing Swannanoa post-Helene to Rodney Jones' semi-surreal Southern-isms, from Dolapo Demuren's dream-sonnet to Liza Hudock's personal meditations on place and space. 

We do not select pieces with any theme or underlying string in mind, but, as the poems and stories fall together, and then fall into sequence, one can't help but notice the associations and relations that start to grow. In this issue, we notice how often these pieces depict an individual grappling with the space they find themself in, or, grappling with someone else, the environment made unfamiliar through the human element (as in E.A. Mayer's "Raptor" and Nick Makoha's "Per Capita"). 

At a time when it can be difficult to hear anything beyond the loudest voices, we are proud to share the words of so many different writers, all grappling with how one makes, remakes, or makes sense of the world. 

Thank you, as ever, for reading, and we hope you find something that resonates with you — 

Reed Turchi & Kate Welsh

Founding Editors