June 20, 2020

Beloved Readers,

A sense of Time. The visceral awareness, the inner clockwork that counts days, weeks, even months passing, seems broken these days. With so many of our routines and recurring activities suspended, we find ourselves asking: what day is this? What am I doing? Why am I here, and not there? What happened to the world I knew? Did I ever really know it? 

It is a difficult time to write anything, and if we are honest with you, dear readers, we will admit that facing an Editor’s Note in this particular moment of time has us quite beside ourselves. Usually we fill this space with images that resonate with the change of season, anecdotes from our lives, gratitude for our contributors, mention of thematic elements at play within the Issue, and sometimes, a vague allusion to things ‘happening in the world.’

Now is not the time for vague allusions. The world is in crisis. People are dying. We are scared and we are angry. We want to end racism. We want everyone to be safe. We want love to reign, not hatred or fear. 

But wanting it doesn’t make it so. Action is required. So we grapple now, not only with what day it is, but what can we do? How can we make this world a better place? 

MoonPark Review is proud to be a journal that has published a wide variety of voices from writers all over the world. We are grateful to have published some very strong pieces from writers of color — but we’d love to see more submissions from Black American writers. Because we are queer ourselves and have done interviews with the queer literary press, we get a fair number of submissions from LGBTQ writers — but we’d love to see even more.  

In the grand scheme of things, who we publish in our small online literary journal may not seem significant. But telling stories matters. Sharing our humanity matters. 

MoonPark Review is our well-spring, a refuge where through the words we are sent, we see beauty, stretch our capacity for empathy and compassion, and come closer to understanding others. 

MoonPark is our home, a hearth where we have learned acceptance of a great truth between people. We believe that one can only come close to understanding others, that without inhabiting another’s mind, heart, skin and history we will never wholly comprehend their love, grief, suffering or joy. But art and stories help. Done well, they take us to the brink of shared experience.

In preparing the proofs of this issue, we noted that we’d accepted more than half of the stories and prose poems before the pandemic lockdown began, including the piece that closes the issue. Yet reading them through today’s lens feels as if they were all written in direct response. Stories transcend.

As we give these works to you, dear readers, we hope that we all grow a bit closer, by learning to accept others, not as us, but as themselves, as flawed as our full understanding may be.

Be Well. 
Stay Strong.
Use Your Voices.

With Love,
Mary Lynn & Lesley Weston-Reed

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