We’re busy proofreading our next issue (8.1), and we can hardly wait until it’s ready—keep an eye out for it in May. Click on “issues” in the pull-down menu above to see the cover and a list of contributors.
Here’s a geeky proofreading factoid: Did you know that the Chicago Manual of Style changed the guidelines for hyphenating compound colors in the 16th edition? The new rule: “In the manner of most other such compounds, compound adjectives formed with color words are now hyphenated when they precede a noun. They remain open when they follow the noun.” So a snow white dress in an earlier issue of CR will be a snow-white dress from now on.
While we check our hyphens, we hope you’ll enjoy some behind-the-scenes comments from our current issue’s contributors. Keep an eye out for more of this bonus material, in completely random order, over the next few days.
Charles Lamar Phillips: Frederick Exley would have called my essay “fictional memoir.” In this kind of writing, he told me, you use memories for stories structured as literary fictions. The basic premise Fred insisted I accept was this: The material a writer’s own life tenders is legitimate, and he has the right to use it.
Dick Allen: The fruit called “Buddha’s hand” is fascinatingly scary. Describing such an object, particularly in rhyme, allowed me to work at one of the types of poems I most hope to compose—the poem as homage to an object and the poem that, simultaneously (should the gods smile), is about something else. In this case I tried to write of the process of aging—maybe the real fear of it—as well as the “earth witness” mudra at the moment the Buddha is transformed beneath the bodhi tree.
Meredith Davies Hadaway: I was watching a heron stroll through the shallows beside a narrow bridge one morning, just about the time commuter traffic was snaking its way through the fog to cross the river. This poem somehow fuses that scene, joining observer and observed in one moment.
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