Introducing Crab Creek Review Co-Editor Jenifer Lawrence

I first came across Crab Creek Review over 15 years ago while browsing used books at a secondhand store in Seattle. I fished a quarter from my pocket for a copy of the 10th anniversary edition of Crab Creek Review, this passage from Laura Kasischke’s poem, “Arms”, having caught my eye: “the cross/casts its shadow on the church lawn/as lovely as a naked man, arms/like wings without feathers/open to hold/the ions and electrons/that make us live.” I backtracked to the poem’s epigraph to learn that a woman and five children had been killed in 1945 when a bomb masquerading as a large silver balloon had exploded. The group had come across the balloon in a field, and went to inspect it, but then, Kasischke tells us, “May explodes like a bride’s bouquet/ tossed, accidentally, into a fan.” The poem ends on an image of white cranes exploding from the ocean “in a frenzy of feather and hydrogen” echoing the earlier image of the bomb that killed 6 people in Oregon.

Poetry offers a change of perspective. Inhumanity and intolerance, exposed, may engender empathy and tolerance. The images of the silver balloon exploding, and the white cranes bursting into the sky, seemed like a metaphor for my own life— oh, what a beautiful mystery life is, but venture too close to discovery, and you’ll suffer the consequences. A failed marriage, and parenting a pair of teenaged boys had sapped my energy and left me doubting my ability to make a difference in the world. I had long since abandoned poetry for engineering, and was working as a civil engineering technician for the government, where I reviewed design drawings for economic development projects. I understood the need for cutting trees and moving dirt to make way for apartment buildings, highways, and shopping malls. The damage to the environment seemed a necessary sacrifice, a byproduct of progress. Engineering includes both inventiveness and innovation—creative elements to be used for good or for gain. I appreciate the creativity and intellect it takes to design an underground transportation tunnel or an intercontinental air balloon. Engineers brought Seattle its crazy street layouts and its hillside communities. Engineers designed the site on which the Seattle Art Museum stands, and architects designed the building, and artists designed and built and painted and sculpted what fills SAM’s halls. I work with engineers for a living, but my life’s work is poetry. I need to be reminded of that from time to time, as I was on the day I first discovered Crab Creek Review.

Crab Creek Review just published its 30th anniversary edition. It’s been 20 years since we published Laura Kasischke’s poem, together with works by Rebecca Wells, Sam Hamill, William Stafford, Tim McNulty, Jody Aliesan, Sharon Hashimoto and more. Writers whose words continue to reach us, whose voices are joined in the new anniversary issue by Frances McCue, Peter Pereira, Susan Rich, Kathleen Flenniken, James Bertolino, Elizabeth Austen, and others. Old voices and new. Some of the poets in the 10th anniversary edition appear as well in the 30th. Voices that endure, poems and stories that outlive the damage we all experience just by being alive.

Engineers launched that silver balloon with its explosive cargo during World War II, a war my father served in, a war he survived. The balloon traveled thousands of miles before exploding in this country and changing a southern Oregon community forever. My father came home from the war changed forever; all soldiers are changed by that experience. What is it, exactly, that changes us? Trauma and damage, yes, but also experience and observation, healing and compassion. The soldier and engineer, the artist and poet are each influenced by living in this world. Each does his or her work, and thereby transforms the world. But can we save it? As writers, we enact change by the simple act of sharing our work, communicating with others. Kasischke’s words are a reminder of why we are here. Like the cranes, flying suddenly up from the water, [we] “fall into the sun/one by one/ through the arms of empty air/ that open/ not to catch us/ but to pass us on.”

Dear writers. Dear poets. Dear artists. Let’s pass our words into the atmosphere. Let’s save the world, or at least cast it in a different light. What strikes me about Kasischke’s poem is that the poet isn’t trying to save the world, she is trying to shine a light—a light that exposes pain and beauty in equal measure, that acknowledges the imperfectness of being human, of the harm we cause and the beauty we embrace in order to survive. This is why I write, why I am ecstatic that other people write, and why I am excited to join Crab Creek Review in its long-standing commitment to the best literature of the Northwest, and beyond.

Kasischke, Laura. (1994). Arms. In L. Clifton, & C. Orlock (Eds) Crab Creek Review Anniversary Anthology (pp. 114-115) Seattle, WA: Crab Creek Review Association.

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Jenifer Browne Lawrence is the author of One Hundred Steps from Shore. Awards include the Orlando Poetry Prize, the James Hearst Poetry Prize and a Washington State Artist Trust GAP grant. Recent work appears in Bellevue Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, Narrative, North American Review, and Rattle. Jenifer lives in a seaside community west of Seattle, where she is co-editor of Crab Creek Review.

Welcoming Aimee Voelz, our new Staff Assistant

Aimee Voelz has recently joined the Crab Creek Review team as a Staff Assistant.  She is a Seattle area writer and consultant working on her first book, a self-help guide for people seeking career changes.  Here are a few words from Aimee:

“My love for reading and writing started early and absorbed much of my attention.  Maybe too much – as a kindergartner I was reading so intently on the bus ride home from school that I didn’t get off at my stop.  I didn’t look up from my book until I heard my mother’s voice and realized that the bus had completed its route, parked at the bus barn, and the driver had phoned my mother to come pick me up!   Since then, I’ve enjoyed reading many genres and writing poetry, fiction, song lyrics, and creative non-fiction.

Each professional role that I’ve held also incorporated writing for marketing communications, print materials, reports, or social media.  Recently I left the corporate world to work as an independent consultant.  That career change allowed me to spend July of 2013 at the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where the experimental approach to creativity took my poetry-writing up a notch.  Currently my non-fiction material is focused on my book and blog, where I write about doing meaningful work that is true to individual values: www.truthanddetails.com.

I’m very happy to join the Crab Creek Review staff as a volunteer assistant in its 31st year of publishing high-quality literary works.”

And we're pleased as punch to have you on board, Aimee!

In Which We Welcome our New Fiction Editor, Sayantani Dasgupta

Barely six months after my essay, Why My Mother Should Take Over the World, got published in Crab Creek Review, I was invited to join its editorial team as the fiction editor. I was delighted and honored, not only because of CCR’s fine reputation but because it would give me an opportunity to exercise my editorial muscle that had been dormant since I stepped away from the world of publishing in 2006 to pursue writing, both as a teacher and student. 

While Crab Creek Review has a history of publishing renowned writers, I am also hoping to find fresh, new voices. I am looking for stories that will stun me with their characters and conflicts, and those that will surprise me with the way they turn. One of my favorite short stories is Jhumpa Lahiri’s Mrs. Sen’s. I have read it countless times and each time I am heartbroken by Mrs. Sen’s loneliness, by her attachment to all the ordinary objects with which she surrounds herself and how they constantly remind her of home. Another favorite is Dan Chaon’s Bees where the father’s day to day existence is scarred by his son’s nightmares and the memory of a past he cannot forget. It’s a deeply haunting story and the author’s grip over its pacing and tension are its greatest strengths.

Since graduating with my MFA in 2006, I have had the privilege of meeting with a variety of writers, and talking to them about craft and process. I have learned about their daily writing practices, favorite books, and so on. I have met writers who prefer to talk only about what has been published and keep under wraps their current projects. And I have also met those who make changes to their manuscript only after discussing it at length with their writing groups. But if there is a way I can distill their collective wisdom and pass it on further, it will be to trust your instinct but not wait for the muse to strike.

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Born in Calcutta and raised in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta’s writing has appeared in several American and Indian journals. In her writing, Sayantani likes to explore the intersection of personal story juxtaposed with political turmoil, popular culture, and religious fundamentalism, especially in the context of South Asia, along with answering the question as to what constitutes an Indian identity in an increasingly global world. She lives in Moscow and teaches writing and South Asian literature at the University of Idaho.


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Important FYI regarding fiction submissions: There are still five days left to submit your stories (and poetry) to Crab Creek Review. Our deadline ends 15 December. Send us your best! We'll read it with care.