About the Winter 1999 Edition

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The Fairfield Review

About The Winter 1999 Edition

Welcome to the Winter issue of The Fairfield Review. Following the archetypal vintner's advice, we have held back this edition so as not to release it "before its time." It has been five long months since our Spring-Summer issue. While submissions from writers continue to increase each month, we waited until we had the full body of work we thought would meet our reader's exacting taste. Thank you for your patience. In our search for quality, we have continued to favor new and unpublished authors, and we are pleased to have new writers to introduce to you. We hope you will agree that, as a fine Burgundy, the result was worth the wait.

This issue is about journeys and pasts. It began last summer for us, traveling through the Cascade Mountains of Washington State in search of William Stafford's poems. Our travel log provides the thread for the opening article, appropriately titled On The Stafford Trail. It is paralleled by a short story rich and chewy in imagery about another journey into the wilderness: Beneath the Surface of Kamloops Lake by Nathaniel Gillespie.

From a far away continent come three poems by our featured poet, Robert James Berry. Start with Navigators and then read Lighthouses and Islay. We hope you share our delight in discovering this author and lecturer who hails from Malaysia.

If the chill of winter has you aching for summer, read David Prestidge's Fourth of July, 1992. For a more recent past, peruse Fall Ends by Halsted, a regular contributor to these pages. There is a piece written half a decade ago, by a retired postman who now teaches at a local college: Swearing Off... Again by Richard Fewell. Another past is portrayed in Walt Phillips' poem Old Man at the Side of His Rickety House. For our return journey, we are pleased to travel on Flight by Nancy R. Scott, a poem written to her son many years ago.

We leave you with a classic poem by William Stafford that holds a special place in our hearts. It is the poem we saw pinned to a bulletin board in a Forest Service ranger's office at the foot of the majestic Cascades Mountains that called us on our journey. It is also a fitting harbinger of St. Valentine's Day.

You can find a complete list of this issue's writings in the Table of Contents and information about contributors in About the Authors. Please send us your comments and suggestions. When you visit our site, please fill out our Guest Book or drop us a note via email. Please continue to send us your work and encourage other writers to venture forth with their poetry and short stories. We continue to look for work from "new" authors of all ages.

As we trudge through the gray cold and rain of February and March, yearning for spring, think about The Fairfield Review and write us of your plantings, greenery and rebirth.

Edward Granger-Happ
Janet Granger-Happ
Editors