Dear Readers,
Our latest issue has arrived! Devour it here:
Spring reminds us of patterns and eternal cycles, of particular motive forces and metamorphoses. “Spring is the time of plans and projects,” Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, recalling for us in English (does it work in Russian, too?) the mechanistic as well as seasonal valences of “spring,” both connoting a potential energy. Once again we proliferate tasks. We plan. We tinker. Here in our own backyard of a past, Anne Bradstreet wrote of spring as the just reward for the winter-ravaged pious: “if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.”
We’re afraid Bradstreet’s puritanism bores us (“my mother told me as a boy/‘Ever to confess you’re bored/means you have no/Inner Resources’”). Here we are and it’s spring and we are hungrier than before. We are not the pious collecting our patient reward, but barbarians energized around a wild pagan fire. What a profligate expense of energy!
OxMag too is cyclical and this is the end of one cycle and the start of a new one—like Yeats’ gyres, widening, unwinding. As we do each year, we hand the reins to more capable people flush with stores of energy. It seems proper to introduce them.
Carly Plank will take the helm as the new Editor-in-Chief. Carly is a second year master’s student in creative writing. Her creative nonfiction has been published in 34th Parallel and her fiction has been published in 3288 Review. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in biology from Aquinas College, located in her hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Justin Chandler steps up as fiction editor. Justin is pursuing an MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. He is currently working on a novel. In addition to his work with OxMag, he serves as editor on The Ryder Magazine’s yearly fiction issue. He prefers fiction about pugs.
Isaac Pickell will MC poetry. He too is a second year Master’s student in creative writing at Miami.
Katy Shay takes the reins as CNF editor. Katy is a graduate assistant at Miami University. She loves creative nonfiction, comics, zines, music, nature, justice, witchcraft, feelings, and goth looks from the late nineties.
And lastly, we thank Joe Squance, our managing editor; the Miami University English Department and all the faculty who have helped us this year; our events coordinator, Michelle Christensen; our genre editors Andrew Marlowe Bergman, Josh Jones, and Ian Schoultz, and all of our readers. Lastly, but most importantly, our submitters, without whom we’d have nothing at all to read and no magazine.
Keep writing,
Evan Fackler and Jess Marshall