By Kathleen Driskell, Editor in Chief
On behalf of the Spalding University’s School of Creative and Professional Writing, home of the flagship low-residency Spalding MFA in Writing program, I’m delighted to announce we have launched the new online literary magazine Good River Review. Our first issue will appear in Winter 2021. Submissions are currently open.
Good River Review resides at Spalding in Louisville, Kentucky, which sits on the Ohio River. Ohio is Seneca for good river. We plan to publish two issues of the review each year, but we will also feature interviews, book reviews, reviews of new plays, TV shows and series and long and short films, as well as craft essays, and other important literary news on a rolling basis on our website. We want Good River to be a surprising and constant resource for all writers.
The talented School of Writing staff—all publishing writers–joins me on the masthead, with Ellyn Lichvar in the role of managing editor. School of Writing faculty will serve as contributing editors, helping us publish the best writing in all the genres we teach in our graduate creative writing and professional writing programs. The editors of GRR will collaborate with Spalding School of Writing graduate students who are appointed to work in an editorial capacity.
Our Good River editors are attracted to writing that launches quickly, speaks to the universal through the particular, and is layered with meaning. The writing I love best moves horizontally, establishing denotative meaning from sentence to sentence while also dipping down (a quality I call verticality) to pick up and pack narrative and lyrics with connotative meaning. That tension between the literal and figurative is what delights me most in writing.
Good River will be a home for work that doesn’t fit neatly into genre categories. We love writing that blurs boundaries, and so contributors will find their work published as prose, lyrics, or drama. In addition, we want to publish the most compelling writing for children and young adults that we can find. We also look forward to sharing links to original web, TV, and short film productions.
Our submission period is now open and will be ongoing. Good River allows for simultaneous submissions and charges no reading or submission fees. Be on the lookout for our call for submissions and submission guidelines.
The editors and staff of Good River Review are grateful to Spalding University for its generous support of our online literary magazine.
Kathleen Driskell is chair and professor of creative writing at Spalding University’s School of Creative and Professional Writing. She is the author of four books of poems most recently Blue Etiquette from Red Hen Press. She currently is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the largest national organization for writers and creative writing programs.