Volume 13, Issue 1 (2024)

Dear Readers,

We are extremely honored and excited to be a part of this issue’s Gandy Dancer. As it is our first semester as Managing Editors, 13.1 feels extra special. We are so thankful for the work Gandy Dancer’s staff has done in order to make this issue happen, and for the writers and artists who trusted us with their work. This issue catches us—readers and staff alike—during an enormous period of transition. In the wake of the most recent election, and amidst uncertainty and fear, we are looking to art to sustain us.

Poet and former Gandy Dancer editor, Lucia LoTempio, was on campus recently and her workshop and reading reminded us of art’s transformative nature, how darkness can grow into something beautiful. An interview with LoTempio and a review of her book concludes this issue and we hope that it is both informative and inspiring.

The fiction in this edition of Gandy Dancer offers us solace by suspending us in new realities. In Kaiser Kelly’s “Clearing,” ambiguity leads to clarity and we are told a story that gently toes the line between poetry and prose. Bruso’s characters long to reach a clearing in the forest, and find that it is both unlike their expectations and exceeds them. Their fear was justified, but no longer needed. Kelly writes: “We were sacrificing ourselves to warnings of the past, to dangers that no longer lurked behind the trunks. We saw all now as it was in these fresh grasses.” This story urges us to look outside ourselves as the characters do the same, journeying to a place they have yearned for, and to think about the consequences of both running and staying where we are.

Zoe LaVallee’s “Inherited Survival” navigates the complexities of time and familial ties. She writes, “time dances like grinding metal and sings like bullets. We hide but do not escape. We scream in silence.” She thinks through heritage, circumstance, and time beautifully, without hesitation. “Head-On” by Alex Fisher considers time in a similar way, writing: “go west down on thirty-nine for an hour, / almost exactly / an hour, / like clockwork, / every time.” The piece is exhaustive in its consideration of what ifs and repetition. The narrator knows their routine, knows what is expected of them, and learns that there is pleasure in those schedules and patterns being broken, in exploring what is beyond.

The poetry in this issue highlights the strength of our bodies, reminds us that they are our own, and yet also inextricably tied to the environment around us. In Giulyana Gamero’s “to the journal i carry (like a burden),” the speaker compares their body to a “living and breathing conch shell.” “my second daughter refused to come out at birth” by Liz Ann Young carries a reader through the process of giving birth, and explores how the speaker “taught / the crickets. / Screamed, / keened / until the crows pleaded with [her] enough.”

Though poetry is often thought of as illusive, these poems stabilize and ground us, despite what Ken Dukes Jr. refers to as “the world’s uncontrollable / unraveling around us” in his “Talk Like Trees.” We’re brought together through the universality of metaphor, through the act of creating meaning. Kelli Charland’s poem, “THIS LIFE OF MINE,” explores exactly that. She writes, “My girl, she calls, / what’s this life of yours / about?” You will find the art in this issue encourages this self-reflection. It is a mirror.

The visual art in this issue plays an important role in this conversation. Isabell Mathew’s “Control” shows an unnerving image of hands grabbing at the face and head of a person, prodding around the subject’s mouth and nose, one red tear falling. This drawing conveys the anxieties many of us share as we face an uncertain future.

Gandy Dancer recognizes that we’re a single organism, completely attached at the hips. What affects one of us affects us all. This journal lets us think through our heartache, our joy, the never ending cycle between the two. Crack open the spine and read along with us.

Sincerely,

Mollie McMullan and Jordyn Stinar