About the Summer 2003 Edition

The Fairfield Review

About The Summer 2003 Edition

Dear Reader,

The Summer 2003 Edition takes us to lands far and wide in a traveling theme-- so if you haven't been able to get away, or if you feel as though you still need an escape, you're in for a treat. We then move into the poetry of childhood and adolescence, and visit other themes as we meander back to the academic rigors of autumn and winter.

Since we arrive at your doorstep in August, we'll start with Europe, where everyone is off on holiday for the month. Steven Scarpa takes us to the charming hills of Fiesole, Italy with Brother Nicholas Running. Feeling full of grace, in the truest sense of the word, we venture to sunny Mexico, thanks to Cary Griffith, in Why I want to Live in Mexico and Mexican Monuments. Rebecca Clark tells us about finding treasures as part of the journey in On Our Way. Our tour goes on with Celia Rosales' short story Corrida, which takes us from California to Madrid. We end back in the U.S., somewhere on the Great Plains, perhaps, in the heat of summer in Drought, by Jane Frazier.

Leaving the travel motif, we enter the mind of youth. Remember what it was like with our classic poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, a child's verse, entitled Bed In Summer, which sums up many of our feelings about the joys of summer and the difficulty of facing any type of bedtime. Continue with While the Music Played, by Louis McKee, and Martyrs, by B. D. Lynch. The memories are not always happy; continue on in Lynch's voice, in Lily's Room. Bruce P. Spang is also eloquent about the tragedy of the young, in Excuses.

To lift your spirits at this point, we introduce you to one of our Editor's Choice winners, Bonnie Enes, with Poet, as she writes about the richness of the five senses. In that educational vein, keep Martha F. Fox company during her Teacher's Insomnia. As we anticipate the change of seasons, there are other events, such as elections. John Sweet offers his take in a revelation, slowly. We turn to matters of love and loss in Kirby Wright's Poem for an Actress and Humane Society, by Bruce P. Spang, and we finish the theme on a jovial note with Kate Moses' Hat, our other Editor's Choice Award Winner for this issue.

Too soon, cooler weather will be upon us, as our writers attest. Bonnie Enes will be thinking of these August days and warmer climes, as she tells us in Island in Winter. We end this issue in the white of winter, in the slow time of night, first with Miles, at Two in the Morning, by Louis McKee and then with By the Almanac by Taylor Graham. We hope you've enjoyed it.

If you have not yet seen the announcement, we are proud of the release of our first printed publication: The Best of the Fairfield Review: 1997 - 2002. This edition, which highlights our favorite offerings from our first six years, is now available on-line. Please feel free to take a peek, and to order from us. Your support goes directly towards the continuation of our free, on-line publication, and we thank you for your ongoing interest and enthusiasm on our behalf.

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.

We are happy to have our electricity back in order to bring you this new issue. It was exciting here, without power! We cooked outside on the grill, carried flashlights, ate by candle-light. In retrospect, it was not a momentous event, as we got our power back in time to save the food in the refrigerator, shower in the morning. In the meantime, it was wonderful to reconnect with the written word again: to sit outside, under the quiet sky, reading a book aloud to a child who had nothing else to do but sit and listen for a while.
We looking forward to hearing from you as you shake out the beach from your life and get back into the fall seriousness of life. We are off the to the CT Poetry Festival* in New London, CT. Best wishes for the end of summer!

Edward Granger-Happ
Janet Granger-Happ
Editors

* See Charles Rafferty's poem, Form Letter, from the festival.

** Please replace the "at" and "dot" with the usual email characters. (This helps keep the SPAM search engines at bay :)