Letter from the editor
Elizabeth Ellen
I never wanted to run this ship. Frankly, I’d rather spend my time writing.
Becca, Ernie’s wife, estranged wife most of the novel until finally she is his ex-wife at the end, based on the author’s, based on Aaron’s, ex-wife, Elizabeth Ellen, who is, oddly, metally, writing these words, typing them into a Word doc at nine in the morning
I wake up glad to not be strung out.
I wonder how my drug dealers are doing.
-Editor at a literary journal attempting to be good, moral ppl (see: 1990s Christian Right)
I never wanted to run this ship. Frankly, I’d rather spend my time writing.
The other thing Belle did
Was burn three holes in my thigh
With her cigarette
Revenge for the chaos I’d caused
He had a little radio, and on the mornings it snowed, he listened over and over to the lists of school closings until he knew them by heart: Kellerville area, Longstead area, Mount Holly area, all the outlying place-names, all the Our Lady of’s. Sometimes there was only a two-hour delay, and he wondered what it must be like, to have the boon of two extra hours like that.
"It captures all the doubts, giddiness, confessional streaks, blabbiness, self-alarms, rationalizations, feigned equipoise, and instantly breakable resolves of a person freshly infatuated and likely in love." -anonymous writer friend
“Transgressive and immediate: you feel these stories shoot through and wrap around you.”
- Kyle F. Williams, Full Stop Magazine
“Lutz’s work is a marvel of the possibilities of language. Each of her sentences is an intricately crafted thing, deeply complex yet crystalline in its clarity . . . her command of each and every word remains supreme.”
--Mira Braneck, The Paris Review Daily
Garielle Lutz is the author of The Complete Gary Lutz, among other books.