Fall/Winter 2020 Special Issue on the Undiscovered
Volume 49, Number 1
Editor’s Note
Dear Reader, Dear Friend,
I write to you in a new year. I write to you, in fact, on the cusp of the presidential inauguration. It seems a good time for fresh starts. It seems a good time for discoveries, and that is exactly what you hold in your hand. The Fall/Winter Issue of Cold Mountain Review is dedicated to unpublished writers, and herein you will find quite a few. Is it too much to say I hope you discover your next favorite writer? Is it too much to say I hope you discover something that buoys you, that gives you hope, that allows you to better confront the world? Probably so. Still, I should tell you that lately, as Amy Clampitt puts it in one of my favorite poems, “Discovery,” I have found myself on “the weedy borderline / between drowsing and waking, / breathing and drowning.” I have found myself mired in sadness and, too often, anger. But working through the poetry, prose, and visual art in this issue with our resident genius Katy Abrams and our brilliant graduate assistant Erin Deitzel, I have found myself waking up, renewed, ready. Almost like we are at the start of something new. Which, of course, we are.
I hope these new voices give you courage; I hope they remind you that while we are all of us on some “dimly imaginable tightrope,” we aren’t on it alone.
Yours,
Mark Powell
