Letter from the Editor

By Rhea Ramakrishnan

Issue 45 • Spring 2022

Dear Reader,

2020 was the year I began reading stories, essays, and poems for Blue Mesa Review. In January, February, and the beginning of March, I met with a group of other readers in a classroom in Albuquerque to discuss the pieces we’d been delegated to read. Often, I brought a tupperware container of sliced apples and a jar of nutella. I couldn’t imagine that, within the year, my relationships with the strangers and acquaintances I sat in a room with would become so mired, all of our lives so much more obviously tied together. And also, I couldn’t imagine a world that feels as small as the world I live in now, where I can, more often than ever before, click a button to listen to an author perform a reading in Galway, a time zone five hours ahead. And, indeed, I did just that this past Friday. The writer was Claire Louise-Bennet and, in response to a question she was asked about how she approaches the “trauma narrative” in her work, she said, “I haven’t written a trauma narrative. It’s just a story about two people.” And, increasingly, I agree that, in my reading, I don’t want to be provided with a message, a clear-cut moral, or a path to understanding. I want to see people interacting with one another and I want the difficulty of that interaction to be rendered authentically.

The pieces in Issue 45 of Blue Mesa Review present the tension between strangers, friends, acquaintances, and lovers better that I can in my summary of them. They present disturbingly imaginable futures in which people can donate years of their lives or eviscerate memories completely. They pick at long scabbed-over recollections of past violences, both physical and emotional. They tell of domestication and disease and the ways that people shape their lives around what they come to see as natural. You’ll have to read on to see what I mean.

A part of me likes to think that I read simply for entertainment. But then, I’d have to admit that I’m entertained by seeing the friction of another person’s mind coming at a hard thing again and again until it bends. I wouldn’t say that the pieces in this issue are easy reading. But I will say that they have helped me parse those difficulties that make more sense represented than experienced. There is a certain satisfaction in that. In 2020, I read stories, essays, and poems for Blue Mesa Review in a classroom in Albuquerque with ten or twelve other people. In 2022, I read them alone alone and also across from other readers, though through computer screens thousands of miles apart. And, still, they hit that same nerve, the same one I hope you all share with me too.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Sincerely,

Rhea Ramakrishnan

Editor in Chief, Blue Mesa Review

Ronald Walker

Ronald Walker lives in the Sacramento area of CA where he paints and teaches art for a living. He holds both an MFA and an MA degree in painting and his work has been shown in more than 45 solo exhibitions over the years.