Letter from the Creative Nonfiction Editor
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It’s exciting to expand our second edition of The Spring Crab to include poetry as well as creative nonfiction. In 2022, we flirted with the topic of summer; this year, the theme of rituals quickly rose to the top. At a time when the so-called “new normal” didn’t look quite as we remembered it, we invited our community of writers to send pieces that (in hindsight) might provide comfort.
Of course, that’s not how it works. Writing that moves us does the opposite. It transports, unsettles, and shakes us free from what we think we know. It unmoors us from habit and convention, which can prove troublesome. The flipside of letting go is that it yields new ways of seeing, feeling, and being. Unchained from the quotidian, the wild heart beats faster and freer. While savoring the familiar holds appeal in uncertain times, exploring the strange and new introduces us to unknown aspects of ourselves. The world-weary among us can again feel wide-eyed; the skilled craftsperson transforms into an apprentice. Which is to say, routine is replaced by potential. It turns out, we’re not done for, life isn’t over, we can start again—and that’s comforting. Anna Suszynski’s “In the Studio” pokes at the notion of the art monster, a person focused on her creative practice above all. This term arises in Jenny Offill’s novel, Dept. of Speculation: “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.” In Suszynski’s telling, we find a mother artist who pulls coils from extruders, who’s lost in music, whose children know not to ask things of her if her work—the ritual of art—is unfinished. Yet, she’s hardly unreachable. She’s given her offspring studio roles that keep them close, and she’s taught them by example to prioritize one’s craft. The speaker notes, “If you need me, find me at my desk writing this down.” Lucy Zhang’s “小燕子” begins with a flower-bedecked swallow, then flies beyond the typical close observations of a meditation on nature. Factories and machines share the landscape with blooms and spring; physical labor and farm animals are juxtaposed with conveyer belts and disease. In a technocentric world that fetishizes Nature—an unruly system separate from “civilized” human/city/industrial life—questions of what’s beautiful, what’s nourishing, and what’s healthy are raised. We are being ritually fed and farmed by our own digital creations—but to what end? And could this nebulous future still be beautiful? Kevin Hershey’s “All Things New” reveals a ritual of unspoken tenderness between father and son. “I had learned how to be a quiet boy,” the speaker says. His father, sensing the boy’s yearning to belong, brings his son on his Sunday route, delivering communion to homebound elders. As the boy grows up, his body transforms, “from vessel of shame to site of pleasure… my life has the trappings of gay modernity: a Brooklyn apartment, a boyfriend, Provincetown.” On a visit home from college, he discovers his father’s Sunday ritual has changed. “I cannot be part of a church that doesn’t love my son,” his father says. Yet, from time to time, the son still finds solace in the sacred space that, for many years, connected them. “The same bricks, the same staring saints—they have not noticed me leave.” Whitney Vale’s “Poetry Rituals” explore the relationship between superstition, ritual, and artistic practice. How many of us keep candles and talismans—stones, bones, photos, feathers—at our writing desks? The place where we make creative work is an altar; atop its surface, we transmute ideas and memories into the embodied flesh of text. Here, too, sacrifice is part of the ritual. In exchange for splitting open our hearts and minds, “We are sometimes graced by longing answered.” Susan Landgraf’s “The Ritual of Light” illuminates the responsibilities we take on for the benefit of others. Her essay opens in a dark, dank basement where the eldest of three daughters, age ten, hastens to make home a safe place for her sisters after school. “My job as the boss is to check the basement to make sure no one has broken in.” With both parents at work, she fixes a snack and instructs her sisters to neatly hang their clothes; the younger girls fuss at being managed, despite feeling scared. “Didn’t you see me check the basement?” she insists, donning a brave face. Inside, the speaker longs to be relieved of this ritual. “I don’t want to go back into the inky dark,” she confides. “I want Sharon to stop crying. I want a chandelier with lots of bulbs and shimmering crystals over my head. I want somebody to give me a coat with a fuzzy collar, and tell me how brave I am.” It’s never possible to predict how writers will respond to any call or how the selected pieces relate until the acceptances are sent. Once collected, the disparate bits of poetry and prose develop mass and gravity; one to the next, they begin to orbit a common sun. Naturally, the tastes of the editors shape what’s chosen, yet an unpredictable alchemy is at work. One senses that a spell has set the system in motion: it’s as if they were never individual essays or poems but parts of a whole, yearning to rejoin one other across space and time. —Gabriela Denise Frank |