Letter from the Editor

By Tori Cárdenas

Issue 40 • Fall 2019

Dear Reader,

Within our digital 30th anniversary issue, you will find our Summer Contest winners, our artists, our judges, and our founder—a group of writers and work as diverse as this place we call home, with as much rich detail, color, excellence, and emotion as an Albuquerque sunset. In 1989, Rudolfo Anaya went into the Dean’s Office and said, out of the clear blue sky, “Can you give me $5000 and we’ll make a literary magazine everyone will be proud of. It’s a logical outgrowth of our creative writing program.” From that, Blue Mesa Review was born.

Since then, Blue Mesa Review has published 40 Issues with creative work from authors and artists all over the world. Our contributors have hailed from Shanghai, Brooklyn, Guatemala, Albuquerque, Afghanistan, and many, many other places. In our 40th issue, and in honor of our 30th anniversary, Blue Mesa Review returns to its roots as a Southwest magazine. Culturally, this place has everything— indigenous history and populations, multicultural border towns, immigrant populations from every corner of the world, families with Spanish, Jewish, German, Korean, Vietnamese, and Islamic roots, among others. Some of us can trace our ancestry back three hundred years. Some of us don’t need paper trails to know we’ve been here even longer. And some of us might have just showed up last week, but we are all part of the Southwest, part of the United States, part of the Americas, part of the globe. All of this is not to say that we are closed to ‘foreign’ narratives—rather, that we see the Southwest as representative of the world at large, showcasing diversity and internationality at its finest.

In this issue, you’ll find the visceral first-place poem from Natalie Wee, that peels open familiar relationships to bare the wounds within. You’ll see our tierra and our familia from the eyes of fellow Bordercanx, Toni Muñoz-Hunt, our first place nonfiction winner. You will also encounter the fiction of Alison Turner and Robin Rosanski and their two storytellers, who weave memories and fragments (and full-on hardware) together in attempts to make sense of their worlds. Through these and more writers you will find that these pieces are more than words and images—this incarnation of our magazine is part of a global community of readers, writers, and artists.

As part of that global community, we have a responsibility to share the art that preserves and cultivates the beauty of our earth and its language (all languages: written, spoken, visual and otherwise), and to figuratively unravel the systems that would destroy them. We have only to bring that powerful and important art to the world, and I am proud to be a part of a journal that does just that, year after year. We want to pass our microphone to those around us in order to amplify their voices and give them space to be heard. This is the Southwest, our home and our world, and we want to share this place with you. (Check out some of the photography inside to see where BMR hails from—Albuquerque!)

In honor of our 30th anniversary, Issues 40 and 41 will showcase contemporary art of the Southwest by featuring two Southwest artists—on our cover and in our pages. Issue 40’s cover is designed by Marina Eskeets, of the Diné Nation. Our Poetry and Nonfiction judges, Jake Skeets and Francisco Cantú, are from the Southwest as well, and brought their experience and expertise to bear on the pieces that were submitted. An enormous thanks is owed to each of them and to Lesley Arimah, our Fiction Judge, to our reading team and our editors, and to each of our submitters for making this issue possible and just so damned good. Thanks to Rudolfo Anaya, Marisa P. Clark, Julie Shigekuni, and every past editor who made 30 years of publishing fine art and writing possible. I would also like to thank you, reader, for taking this art in, understanding it as only you can, and reflecting it back into your world. Enjoy.