Tonight is the start of Yom Kippur—which my son has learned
to call, “I’m Sorry Day.”
“What have you got to be sorry for?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said. I should be
so lucky. (And so blithely confident,
but that’s another topic.)
Let me start with thanks: thank you –thank you VERY much to
everyone who sent in submissions by the August 31st deadline: we
will be considering everything for the Fall/Winter issue—including those pieces
which were sent months ago to be considered for a previous issue. (I’m so
sorry!) We are catching up, but over the summer, we had a skeleton crew (just
me, for the most part), and although we have reviewed much of the work that
came in, we have not had time to write and send all the letters out.
After the High Holidays, we will be back to a normal schedule,
with regular editorial meetings. And we
will contact everyone who has sent us work.
I’d also like to thank everyone who contributed to the
Spring/Summer issue, which is now available, and I would especially like to
thank DAN BEVACQUA, our fiction/non-fiction editor, whom I inadvertently left
off the masthead, but to whom we owe a wonderful short story by MATT ROSSI.
I owe one more apology to our first-prize winner, EVE FORTI,
whose poem we printed without noticing a few mistakes. We will be posting the corrected version soon so that
you can see it as she meant it to be: go to the Contest section of the Common Ground Review website and click on her name. If you click on the poem title, "Beautiful," you will see comments by this year's contest judge, IAIN HALEY POLLOCK. (Thank you, Iain!)
The next blog will be about revising poems—several of our
poets have agreed to let us post copies of versions they originally sent us, in
contrast to the versions they finally wished to have us print. In some cases, we went with the revision; in
others, we went with the original, and we will talk about why we made those
choices..
We have also been discussing having a theme issue, and we
would love to hear your ideas on what theme(s) you’d like to write about.
Thanks for reading this—a happy, healthy, sweet new year to
you, and well over the fast!
