Several lifetimes ago, as an undergraduate student at St. John’s College, I undertook the study of seminal works of Western literature and philosophy. To my provincial teenage mind, these books offered a sense of location and identity in the flow of history. I marveled at how stories could stretch across millennia to articulate something I hadn’t known was inside me. Here, the authors seemed to say, these will help you make sense of the world. Now, nearly twenty years since I began that adventure, I find myself more than ever in need of new stories that capture or illuminate some piece of the world. Here, in these pages, we have found some. Stories that stretch across continents, cultures, and generations to gift us with an experience, an understanding, or a question. May they be stars in the constellations of your own understanding—guides that remind us that wherever we are going in this terra incognita, we are not alone on the journey.
—Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge
Fiction Editor
We turn to fiction because, at its core, it reminds us of our humanity. At once of this world and apart from it, short stories validate our need for identity, the importance of place, and the power of relationships. The emerging voices featured in this edition of Oyster River Pages each explore the foundations of belonging and becoming: we meet characters who are either unexpectedly alone or rushing toward independence, who consider how (and if) knowledge gets passed from one set of hands to another. We take winding roads in desperate search of something familiar, play tabletop jukeboxes and balance between past and present. We are reminded, as the Skin Horse once told the Velveteen Rabbit: “It doesn't happen all at once. . . . It takes a long time.” It is my hope that you find a piece of yourself in these words, that they hold you tight as you persevere and push forward into the great space ahead.
—Stephanie Trott
Guest Editor, Emerging Voices in Fiction
No matter if you were heading east or west, there was always traffic on the eighteen-mile Atchafalaya Basin Bridge. Faith knew this when she packed a weekend bag and filled her Nissan with gas, when she got onto the ramp that would lead back to Lafayette, when cars began to slow as they drove past a cop tucked onto the grassy shoulder.
Read MoreAnnouncing the plane’s descent, the pilot said the lightening was miles away, but the brilliant synapses lighting the night sky looked close enough to strike. That remote possibility briefly distracted Julia from her fear that someone would find out about the bees.
Read More
