About the Winter 2003 Edition

The Fairfield Review

About The Winter 2003 Edition

Dear Reader,

We would like to take a moment to tell you about our growth since we started, in 1997, six years ago this month. As of this writing, an average of 2,400 readers per month* come to The Fairfield Review, an increase of 61% from just a year ago and over a twenty-fold increase since 1997 (see our visitor accesses by issue graph). These are heady times for us, with numbers indicating a readership that exceeds the subscriptions of many 'printed' literary journals. This is a strong indication of the strength of the digital medium. We want to take this moment to thank all of you for supporting The Fairfield Review with your submissions, your avid readings, and your thoughtful comments. In the next month, we will be asking for additional support as well as offering you the opportunity to own our first printed edition -- The Best of the Fairfield Review:1997 - 2002! To celebrate this milestone, we gave our website a modest face-lift, featuring the photo from the cover of the publication on our home page.

Starting with this issue, we have created the Editor's Choice Awards, given to the pieces we feel best display the type of work we seek to publish. The Editor's Choice Award will be noted in the Table of Contents as well as within this introductory section.

Our Winter 2003 Edition is full of love and romance, perfect for release on Valentine's Day Weekend, to warm up the last few weeks of a brutal winter season. Let's start with our "classic" poem, To My Dear and Loving Husband, by Anne Bradstreet, then generate a little Steam Heat, by Bonnie Enes and stay hot and sweet with Sugar Pine, by Thomas Kellar, the winner of our new Editor's Choice Award.

Keep your burners warm with Red, by Andrea Alterman, then slow down the heated pace a bit with Our Tree, by Sandy Ackers.

Continue on this more muted note with Everlasting, by P. Michael Mastrofrancesco, then turn from the blood-red theme of illness to the darker side of love. Begin with our other Editor's Choice Award poem in this issue, Heart's Pirate, by Bruce W. Niedt, and move on through sadder relationships in Paperback Days, by Lisa Zaran, Sunday Mornings, by Aimee Stoddard, ending with Tomato Soup for One, by James R. Whitley.

From the mother's perspective, wake the next day At Six a.m., by Lori Williams, march through the communal memory of war in balls of your feet, by Peter Layton, and then shift keys again with Slow, by Martin Woodside and The Whole Orange, by Daniel Doherty. You're out of the bitter now, back to sweeter themes.

Read the short story Secret Stitches, by Tim Wenzell, about the strength of a family's bonds and the mysteries of memory for a young brother and sister. Visit Meg Early's Iowa City, the site of her inspiration for writing and creativity. Continuing on the writing and the creative path, read Sentence, by Letitia L. Moffitt, a tour de force of a writing assignment. Youth continues, holding hands at the Crest Theater, Age 15, by Robert Peake. When romance leads to marriage, there are the Cousins, by R.S. Carlson. For those for whom marriage is not the answer there is Ground, by James Owens.

We wish you the best of times in All the Clocks in My House, the second offering by Editor's Choice poet Bruce W. Niedt. We give you the final push toward spring in the first personal essay we've offered on these pages, A Foreign Country Called Boys, by Jessica Bram. We're proud to be offering this essay and hope to find more promising works in this vein.

Please be sure to send us your comments and suggestions for future issues by filling out our Guest Book or dropping us a note via email to fairfieldreview at hpmd dot com **

You can find a complete list of this issue's writings in the table of contents and information about contributors in About the Authors.

This weekend, our cupboards are filled with canned goods, anticipating the worst, be it a raging winter storm or more. In the meantime, we steal a moment to watch our breath, caught in the still air. It is shattering cold in Connecticut, with snow blocking the driveway and children under feet. With everyone trapped inside, computers fill the empty space of the time, beeping and clicking. Sometimes, we can coerce the kids to play Scrabble, to toy with words. Today, we used the computer to buy more books, to keep them reading, reading, reading, while we wait and watch the trees, willing the arctic blizzard to subside.

We looking forward to hearing from you when you emerge and your eyes adjust to the lights of spring.

Edward Granger-Happ
Janet Granger-Happ
Editors

*We measure readers as the number of daily visitors net of search engine and other spiders and robots that index web sites.
** Please replace the "at" and "dot" with the usual email characters. (This helps keep the SPAM search engines at bay :)