Editor’s note
The photographs featured in this issue of New Letters were taken, though we can’t be sure exactly when, at some time during the 1930s. They provide a rare glimpse into the daily life of Roma people almost 100 years ago, and so of course what strikes the contemporary viewer first is the strangeness of that life, or so it seems from here. Oxen pulling carts through the streets. Barefoot women selling popcorn out of baskets. Priests in long robes, with expressions so severe they send a chill up the spine. And the clothing. It takes a moment for our eyes to adjust—to see the tunics and hats, for instance, as everyday clothing rather than costumes, which is likely the only place we’ve encountered such garments before, in high school productions of Peter Pan or Brigadoon, perhaps. But it’s not long before the strangeness subsides and the familiar creeps in. Something about the eyes of a popcorn seller reminding us of a great aunt we knew in childhood, or the profile of a smoking man recalling that of an old teacher. We are able to see, in addition to what is distant and unfamiliar, what is already known to us, sometimes even deeply-held. There’s something magic about those moments of recognition. Proust knew this well, and used it to good effect in his epic meditation on the play between past and present. Twenty-some years after trudging through In Search of Lost Time, I don’t remember much in detail, but I most clearly remember those moments of identification, as young Marcel declares the characters around him to be the living
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embodiments of figures painted centuries ago by Botticelli, Fra Bartolomeo, Gentile Bellini. Many of the pieces published in this issue play with time in similar ways, finding insight and meaning in the resonance between the present and past, between the familiar and strange. The hero of Jeffrey Winter’s novella Do You Remember Me? is a retired English teacher who has been living in a self-imposed exile for five years, doing little with his time but watching country westerns; then the plot of a real-life western is delivered almost literally to his doorstep, and he sets about answering the question that comes for all of us, eventually—whether or not to enter the fray. Our hero’s journey unfolds against the backdrop of the journeys we’ve seen before, all those John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies, and in the tension between what we already know, and its new presentation, which I would describe as feeble yet earnest, come some of the story’s greatest moments. In Courtney Miller Santo’s “If/Then,” we see a parent doing her best to guide her children through the dangers of COVID-19, isolation perhaps chief among them; her story as a parent is cut through with memories of her own childhood, struggling to connect with the behavior of her father, always regarding the sky for signs of the coming apocalypse. In “Right Now, I’m A Chauffer,” Bud Jennings reflects on the process of being uprooted from the city life he loves and planted back in the “hinterland” of his childhood, in order to care for his elderly mother; as the piece unfolds it trades between the then and now, between the person he used to be (and who his mother still believes in), and the person he is today. Jessica Walker’s “Development” wonders what it means, especially as a bereaved person, to live in an apartment building that, however cleverly remodeled, was once a hospital; we see how the building’s history, as well as the narrator’s, continually haunt the present.
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Good writing, more than anything else I can think of, has the power to position us in time in such a way that we can hear both the reports of the past, and the echoes that sound in the present. The power of these moments can be just about dizzying. We’ve enjoyed the experience of being transported by the stories and poems collected here, and hope you do, too. As always, we’d love to hear what you think at newletters@umkc.edu. Until next time, we wish you the very best. —C. Hodgen