Dear Readers,
With this third issue of Good River Review, we’ve just finished our maiden voyage around the sun and are now entering our second year of publication. If the first year is any indication of the next, we can look forward to publishing remarkable work by writers who continue to push boundaries of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, writing for children and young adults, and dramatic writing for TV, screen, and stage.
This spring we’re pleased to bring you prose by four wonderful writers, Tommy Dean, Jessy Easton, Michael Henson, and Crystal Wilkinson, who each explore the human desire for connection with each other, a subject always well worth writing and reading about.
Our lyric offerings include poems from Ukrainian poets Dmitry Blizniuk and Tatiana Retivov whose work we are proud to feature alongside poems by January Gill O’Neil, Andrew Najberg, and other marvelous poets.
This issue also presents a poem by Spanish poet Fernando Valverde translated by Carolyn Forché. Here too in this spring issue of Good River, you’ll find a review of Valverde’s America by Jeremy Paden, a Spalding faculty member in poetry and translation, as well as Laura Johnsrude’s review of Dear Damage by Ashley Marie Farmer, and Spalding fiction and creative nonfiction faculty member Robin Lippincott’s review of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway by Robin Black.
The issue closes with two essays on the writing life from our new anthology Creativity & Compassion: Spalding Writers Celebrate 20 Years. Faculty member in Writing for Children and Young Adults Beth Bauman offers her thoughts “On Crafting Surprise in Fiction,” and Bruce Marshall Romans, faculty member in Writing for TV, Screen, and Stage, shares his essay “On Fear.”
As you can see, there’s lots to enjoy in this issue. Thanks as always to our contributors for allowing us to publish their beautiful work, and also to our student editors, as well as our MFA students at large in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing who are involved as readers and recommenders of all submissions. We also would like to thank Vernon Town for allowing us to use his art for our new cover.
Please enjoy this Spring 2022 issue of Good River Review—and send us your work to consider for future issues.
Yours,
Kathleen Driskell
Editor in Chief