As we bring out this fourth issue of Good River Review, we’re also gearing up for our fall residency here at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Soon we’ll be gathering MFA and MAW students, alumni, faculty, and distinguished literary guests for a wonderfully enriching week of workshops, readings, lectures, and sister-arts events. We deliver three graduate credit hours in seven days, which means we pack a lot into residency—from Saturday to Saturday, we present more curriculum, readings, and community conversations than seems possible. It can be exhausting, frankly, but it’s also exhilarating. So much so that in the evenings, we don’t seem to be able to let it all go for sleep, and we’ll gather nightly for more writing comradery in what has become our student/faculty/alumni lounge, the beautiful lobby of the Brown Hotel, which serves as our dormitory during residency.
When looking over what our students, faculty, and editorial team have curated for you in this issue, I am reminded of the rich residency conversations we have, sunk down into the comfy cushions of the couches in the Brown’s lobby. There you might enter a conversation about some new writer you’ve discovered and want to share with your writing friends, or you may want to mention the title of a new book of poems or short stories or a novel or memoir you’ve been excited to start reading. Around a table across the way, a group of playwrights might be talking about the challenges of their new plays and how they were inspired by something recently seen at the theater. And, always, at the bar there are students and faculty in a confab about something they’ve just heard in a faculty lecture, something that has illuminated the way through a writing problem.
These are the same sorts of creative conversations presented in this issue of Good River Review. We’re happy to share interesting new work in prose, lyrics, and drama as well as meaningful book reviews and literary craft discussions. This issue is full of eclectic and electric work—the poems take care with language and are tender and responsive to the times—one poetry contributor even asks you to read upside down; fiction contributors provide crisp new takes on storytelling; and a playwright shares an excerpt from a timely play soon to be transformed into film. The editorial staff of Good River Review is delighted to share all of it with you.
As always, I want to thank our wonderful editorial readers, all of whom are creative writing students of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing, as well as our student editors, also graduate students here: McKenna Horsley, Joshua Keim, Tyrel Kessinger, Sarah Ladd, Lauren Mulvihill, Kelsey Thomas, and Melanie Weldon-Soiset. I’m grateful to Laura Johnsrude, our assistant book review editor, as well as my other colleagues on the Good River masthead: Ellyn Lichvar, Katy Yocom, and Lynnell Edwards.
Enjoy reading!
Kathleen Driskell,
Editor in Chief
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