Dear Readers,

Thank you for your patience as we have assembled this issue. The Swannanoa Review is a labor of love, and this year — and particularly the last third or so of this year — has been full of big emotions.

Your co-editors got married in September (what scandal!), and, only six weeks or so later, our advisor and beloved mentor Ellen Bryant Voigt passed away.

Two weeks before she passed we had the honor of visiting her and her daughter Dudley at their home in Vermont to record the audiobook for Ellen’s COLLECTED. As Ellen has been so deeply in our thoughts as we’ve assembled this issue, we thought it would be fitting to share some writing about that experience:

Two weeks ago I sat in the corner listening as Ellen recorded — word by word, line by line — her entire life’s work, with me following along.

Dudley Voigt had graciously arranged for Kate and I to come up to visit , so Ellen and I could work on recording the audiobook of her Collected — but — once the doors were all closed and she and I sat alone in the front room, the tape rolling , the microphone in place, she quickly revealed her ulterior motive (as she called it) — that she wanted me there so I could see the house, the roof, the trees, the hawks, the wood beams that oozed resin behind the stove — that is, she wanted me to see where the poems came from, the poems that she dedicated her life to, and have been the backbone of my understanding of what poetry is — in written word and air — since I was two.

We sat there, and she read, and between poems sometimes she’d pause and explain something about one to me — who she was trying to embody, or what that line ending was supposed to do, or what she regretted about it. And of course, I couldn’t help but ask some questions, though I didn’t want to cause too much extra chatting —- breath was not an easy thing to come by.

I recorded, and she read, and in many ways this has been the story of my life, too — the kid in the room, listening, as the poets work to wrangle the world around them into poems, into something back into the air.

We didn’t finish. The pentameter lines were tough on stamina (her note, not mine!) , but she recorded the first 350-ish pages , leaving the last two books for a session that would have been next week.

The lesson is obvious, isn’t it? All I long to hear is the life between the poems, as well as in. Isn’t it obvious? The life’s work never long enough, never enough time.

We sat, and she read the poems, and she told me what it was that went into them, and around them, and which voices she was hearing when, and what voices she hoped to give voice to.

Poetry does not come from the page, but from the life — from the world we live in, and the world’s we create and inhabit as our own. We are deeply appreciative of you all for sharing your worlds with us, and we are honored to be able to try and create a world of them together.

Thank you for reading —

Reed Turchi & Kate Welsh