2023 Issue on Renewal

Editor’s Note

Loyal readers and new visitors,

This breathtaking issue, focused on a myriad of works that inhabit the delicate and nuanced ideas of renewal, has been a full year in the making. To our amazing contributors, we are grateful for your patience and unwavering support through a time that, for CMR, has been less about renewal and more about transition.

We all face change in the course of our lives. Sometimes we can be found eagerly running toward it and sometimes we are trying to narrowly escape its reach. But that we will face it is an inevitable and universal experience; a deeply vulnerable part of being alive. This has been a deeply vulnerable year for the editors at CMR, and we have endeavored to remain steadfast in the mission of this magazine while incorporating the flexibility needed to adapt to change we did not seek out.

As you can see, we have undergone a transition in both space and appearance. Our much beloved website, coldmountainreview.org, is now a shadow only available on the Wayback Machine Internet Archive to those who choose to seek its memory. We are here now, in a new space and with a new facade. But trust us in this: our content, our focus, and our heart has not changed.

Over the many years of its publication, Cold Mountain Review has gently shifted course in the focus of its content, at times more interested in one particular aspect of eco and social justice than another. But it has not wavered in its mission to create the serious mischief of cultural change. And, I would argue, in its parallel mission to respond to cultural change.

In that mission we stand fully committed.

In service of that mission we ask for your support. Stay with us, reader. Wherever our journey takes us, stay with us.

We very much want to stay with you.

Your Editors,

Katy Abrams and Mark Powell

Featured Submissions

Where Is Cold Mountain?

by Zackary Vernon
Personal Essay