We just heard from a freight company that has custody of a pallet containing Cincinnati Review Issue 9.2—they’ll be releasing this bookish bounty to us tomorrow! And then, after carefully stuffing each little volume into a labeled envelope, we’ll send our freshly printed literary offering into the world, wishing it well, singing “So long, farewell…” We’ve started fashioning our curtains into clothing (Brian Trapp gets to wear a bandanna made of blue paisley, Becky Adnot-Haynes brown tweed leggings) to wear as we sing in chorus. The following contributors had music in mind as they wrote their pieces, which you can read in full in the issue, available for purchase here.

Naomi Guttman (on her poems “Thin wishes” and “Domestic Dirge”): Three years ago, I began writing poems about a couple and their sons, which has now become the novella-in-verse The Banquet of Donny and Ari. The project began as an exploration of the tension in my own life between the desire to throw myself into life’s pleasures and the need to hold back, to conserve resources, to abstain for the sake of others. I divided the individual into two characters with distinct temperaments: Dionysian “Donny” is a musician; abstemious “Ari” is a textile artist. As the narrative of the collection unfolds, we discover that after long illness, Ari’s mother has recently died, and these two poems embody some of the feelings of loss, guilt, and anger that Ari experiences after this abandonment.

Margaret Luongo (on her story “Word Problem”): Probably because I’m terrible at math, I had been wanting to write a story in the form of a word problem. I couldn’t think what the story might be about, though, until we attended the Cincinnati Fringe Festival two years ago. A small group performed John Cage’s Radio Music. Clearly these were trained musicians, and most of them were young. I looked around the audience and wondered what people thought of this chaos, if that’s what it was—young men and women, fiddling with radio knobs, a string quartet bowing, plucking, vocalizing. Some of musicians looked happy, playful; others were intently focused. I wondered what had happened to them in their professional training and experience to lead them to this stage. That was the question the story would answer.

Randall Mann (on his poem “Young Republican”): I don’t have too much to say about the poem itself: I played Ronald Reagan at a mock debate at my middle school, and like Reagan, I destroyed mock-Mondale. But the whole scene had a bizarre musical component that I left out. There was a chorus performance of “Hello Dolly” with the lyrics changed to Hello Mondale and Hello Reagan. And then the smoldering dance-corps performance of The Time’s “Jungle Love,” all slinky leggings and eighth-grade ’80s sex appeal. What.

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