Letters to a Friend: From the Editor

Abstract

Letters to a FriendFrom the Editor Anna Lena Phillips Bell It's no secret that I'm a fan of the U. S. Postal Service. Sending and receiving letters is one of the things I love most. Here at Ecotone we're about to have one more reason for writing letters, and for going out with hope to check our mailboxes. This July, after six years on the North Carolina coast, Beth Staples will depart her post as senior editor of the magazine, editor for Lookout Books, and a member of the creative writing faculty at UNC Wilmington. She'll head to Washington and Lee University, where she will become the editor of the venerable Shenandoah. We are thrilled for her, and for Shenandoah, lucky duck of a magazine. But it is nearly impossible to estimate the size of the gap that will be left by her departure. Beth thinks alongside the writers she edits, helping them navigate big structural edits and subtleties of character and dialogue. Working on edits with her has afforded me a rare pleasure—that of thinking things through with a brilliant editor and writer whose sensibility is different enough from mine to offer useful insights, yet similar enough that my intuitions are amplified. We're losing not only a skilled editor but a fine teacher, colleague, and friend. Beth's students, particularly the Publishing Laboratory teaching assistants, will tell you about her humor and empathy, her supportive feedback, her laugh. Her colleagues value her clear-eyed vision about not only editing, publishing, and writing, but the workings of sexism, racism, and other sources of oppression as they affect writers, teachers, and editors. In all these realms, Beth can put a finger on precisely the most difficult thing, the thing you knew needed thinking about. But she doesn't poke meanly at those soft spots. It's more like a kind, funny poke—sardonic, sometimes, but insightful, perceptive, attuned to the other person's intentions. The questions she asks of the writing she edits and the people around her are inflected with a kindness that disarms old defenses, allowing folks to set aside what's scary and do the good work. Her efforts have not gone unnoticed in the literary world. Stories and essays Beth acquired and edited for Ecotone have been reprinted in the Pushcart Prize anthology, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and have received special mention in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Essays. And that's not to mention her work for Lookout Books, including, most recently, as editor of Clare Beams's story collection We Show What We Have Learned, a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the Young Lions Fiction Award. For this issue, she has found us even more stellar stories than [End Page 5] usual: tales of woe and wonder from Bojan Louis, Chaitali Sen, and Renee Simms, and essays on sailing, evangelism, and a family home from Rachel Z. Arndt, Cameron Dezen Hammon, and Rafia Zakaria. All these and more sit alongside the issue's crop of poems, featuring bats, sparrows, hornets, and an elusive coy-wolf, from poets including Andy Young, Jan Verberkmoes, Catherine Carter, and Katie Hartsock. In Poem in a Landscape, Anna Maria Hong brings Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" into the present moment, and Keith Knight's comic imagines what classic board games would be like if they included a more complete version of U. S. history. Stephanie Strickland offers this issue's map, an ordering of texts generated by methods used in bell ringing. In Reclamation, which Beth has curated since joining the Ecotone team, Viet Thanh Nguyen reminds us of the vigor and glory of Edward P. Jones's "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons." And Adrienne Elise Tarver, whose art is featured on our cover, talks about her series Eavesdropping, from which we've reprinted several more images inside. I'm happy to write that Beth will remain on Ecotone's masthead as a contributing editor. I can't wait to read the new issues of Shenandoah she'll edit, and I'm excited by the prospect...