It’s been more than a half a year since our first Meet the Editors post, where we were introduced to many of the digital-focused editors who have been bringing you amazing web exclusives every other week.
This time, we’re bringing you a behind-the-scenes look at a smattering of our newer readers, who spend their time searching for gems among the many fairy tales we’re so lucky to receive.
Submissions to our fifth annual contest close on August 31st, so be sure to plunk down your entry for a chance to win $1,000 plus publication in 2019’s Pink Issue.
Mary Haidri
Reader
I spend my days writing in the tower of a crumbling Victorian house and my nights haunting a library. For me, fairy tales are creative instructions for survival and I appreciate being exposed to new work as a poetry reader. In my own writing I’m interested in themes of displacement, ancestors, gender, disenfranchised grief, animals, God, motherhood, and women’s work. I hope to support other writers pursuing the themes that knock on their doors in the middle of the night.
Latifa Ayad
Reader
Hi, I’m Latifa, and I’ll preempt your question of how such a white-looking girl got the name Latifa with the answer that I’m Libyan American. I’m a lover of the weird, dark, and spoopy. As a fiction reader I look for things that stir something deep in my gut or make my heart ache. In my daytime hours I write at coffee shops and work at my local library. And as you’d expect from someone who reads for a literary magazine, in my evenings I cuddle with my two cats, Padfoot and McGonagall.
Gale Marie Thompson
Reader
What I love most about fairy tales is what I love about my favorite poems: through the gears of language and logic and impossibility, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar becomes familiar. Abstracted images or characters we see so much in fairy tales and myths (“swan,” “Red,” “Queen,” “witch” “ice,” etc.) means that those words are charged with all past and (possible!) future associations. Those charged words, conflicting, pairing, and bumping up against each other, become a constellation that brims with its own logic and mystery—intuitive, aware, and unforgiving. They challenge. They subvert. They bellow. They belong not only to our time but to times before and after, so that the poem is an operation in magic, maybe, like an apparition/apparation. I’m thinking of Robert Duncan: “not to express the Image but to call up its Presence, to cause it to happen.” I’m always interested in seeing how much magic can be generated in the smallest spaces, and I’m excited to see how writers are building new constellations and definitions in their work.
Lyana Rodriguez
Reader
I’m a writer of both the grotesque and the fantastical with large dollops of poetry on the side. When I’m not writing or into my special interests, you can find me reading all over Miami, FL. The poems I most enjoy are multi-layered with beautiful language. Even the simplest wordplay can lead to something that will leave me thinking on the subject for weeks. I look forward to reading your creations.
