I’ve been listening to the podcast Good Hang with Amy Poehler, each week since it started and at the end of each episode, she asks her guests what they are listening to, watching, or reading that makes them laugh or brings them joy. The answers range from Saturday Nigh Live skits to videos of people singing horribly, but it always reminds me of a professor I had who once talked about poetry being a balm for the soul. I have carried that sentiment ever since, realizing that for me, it’s any good writing. It’s what I turn to when the world around me feels rough and unbearable and darkness looms around each corner of the internet. When we curate our issues, I imagine our readers finding a soothing balm in our pages and an invitation to be lost among carefully sculpted words and images.

 In “Ride to Nowhere” by Stephanie Reddoch sculpts a tale of young boys testing their bravery and yearning for each other’s approval and acceptance. It’s a universal tale of boyhood, childhood, really, where Reddoch perfectly captures the voice of young boys learning when to accept a challenge or set the bar for each other.

“Ghost Girl Delivery” by Christina Tudor is an atypical ghost story that unravels into a beautifully crafted metaphor about grief and the perfectly natural things that haunt us far more than anything supernatural. Tudor treats the ghost in her story as something so matter of fact that she’s delivered just as anything else from Amazon would be. It’s the normalcy of the content that makes the emotional impact of the ending land so well.

Olivia Brochu lays out a multicourse meal in “Reconciliation Brunch” that not only whets the appetite with her imagery, but also reveals that the end of a friendship, especially a long friendship, can be the hardest kind of break up to swallow. The structure of the piece, built like a menu for the meal, reveals the points that led the relationship to its end, and to the realization that like most break ups, was a long time coming.

And finally, “Told like Scripture” by Trista Hurley-Waxali is a story about family in all its messy glory. It is a story of how we love our family despite the ways they hurt us or create pain we cannot escape.

Sometimes acknowledging the pain and trials of our human condition is indeed a balm, and I’m bolstered to invite you to join us for our Fall Issue.

Good hang,

Elizabeth De Arcos
Senior Fiction Editor
The Citron Review