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Editor's Turn Amy G. Whitney When my family chose to travel to British Columbia for vacation this summer, we were hoping for new sights and experiences. We planned hiking and whale-watching, knew that the rocky coast of western Vancouver Island would be vastly different from the familiar, shallow sand beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. So when we arrived in Vancouver and drove along a river road for our first close-up look at west-coast water, it was immanently satisfying to look up and see mountain peaks in almost every direction. However, it was simultaneously astounding and annoying to look down and see plantain, blackberry brambles, vetch, crane’s bill, and dandelion—just like in my side yard back in Georgia. This travel experience resembles, in a way, my experience with electronic publication of this literary journal. Reading and publishing the work of new and established writers is inherently rewarding, and knowing that the Internet makes any electronic journal instantly available nearly world-wide gives me hope that works appearing in Kennesaw Review will find a large and varied audience. As a bonus, every issue is more enjoyable to read than I expected, and I have had high expectations. But we still do the small work of handling letters and envelopes, of acquiring and managing a budget, of tracking manuscripts as they come in, are read and discussed. As it turns out, even though the publication is electronic, it is still a publication. Along the trails on several of our vacation hikes, full-sized flowers that looked like dogwood bloomed on plants that rose only about six inches from the ground. In Georgia, all the dogwoods bloom at eye level or higher. The west-coast plants were similar enough for me to recognize them as dogwoods and to find them in a book on western plants: common name bunchberry, Latin name Cornus Canadensis, the same genus as the dogwood in my yard at home. We are a print-oriented group (gaggle? herd? business?) of editors, with shelves of print journals that, added together, could just as reasonably be measured in furlongs as board-feet, so we have worked (our Web maven has worked on this more directly than the rest of us) to translate the text experience of a print journal to the web page. It isn’t identical, but parts are similar. My hope is that readers will find the format of Kennesaw Review to be familiar, like the very short dogwoods so far from my home, and be encouraged to read the new writing that is published here. The formal, Latin genus/species name for the dandelion that grows on both coasts translates basically to “official cure for disorders.” Although I have heard complaints out in the literary world that, just maybe, too many literary journals are currently in existence, we are publishing these new stories, essays, and poems online. The general thought here is that, perhaps, by making these creative works widely available, one or two fewer people will “die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there” (Williams). Williams, William Carlos. “From ‘Asphodel, that Greeny Flower.’”poets.org.
2003. |
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