Letter from the Editor
Earlier this year, Headlight was fortunate to host Katherine E. Standefer for a workshop on trauma informed writing pedagogy and a discussion of her book Lightning Flowers. We talked about the medicine of story, how the need for sensitivity and compassion pairs with the demands of form, and the writer’s responsibility to their audience. Katherine emphasized how crafting the experience of trauma into art both helps heal the soul and transforms the reader, but she was clear that it’s not enough just to suffer in print: we have to make it art.
Craft was also the subject of a series of essays we published in the High Beams this year on “The Process.” These pieces find writers describing the steps they take to develop and realize a literary work. Folks discuss their inspirations, stages of their drafting, the swings and misses, and the messes they’ve made. So far, we’ve published excellent essays from a group of our favorite writers, most of whom explore the problem Katherine posed: how to transform personal experience, often painful and traumatic, into meaningful connection through literature. Robin Silbergleid’s “Interrupted, An Essay in Fragments: Or, Write Like a Mother,” for example, considers the difficulty of writing between the million other commitments of work and motherhood; jason b crawford’s “The Line that Form Our Community: The Poetics of Black Joy” looks for joy where the poet is expected to find oppression and pain; and James Whorton’s “Flow of Words” and John Henry Fleming’s “I Didn’t Write This” also tackle craft and memory, experience, and history.
It’s been a busy year of change and renewal at The Headlight Review. Since joining the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, we removed our submission fee and received more submissions than ever before. The influx saw us reading, reviewing, and working together with our staff and readers. It’s a mixed blessing to receive so much great work knowing we can only publish a limited amount of it, but we’re quite proud of the collection we’ve put together. In this issue, you’ll find sustaining poetry, excellent fiction, and more creative nonfiction than we’ve published in the past, all of it grappling with the form of language to communicate ineffable human experience.
As we open the third volume of THR, I’d like to extend my thanks to our new guest editors: Mary McMyne for fiction and Abhijit Sarmah for poetry. Their insights and commitment to publishing the very best work have guided us all in the production of this issue. As ever, many thanks are also due to our hardworking editorial team: Brittany Files, Antwan Bowen, and Veronica Perez; and our dedicated readers: Marianna Gibson, Karah Nance, Matthew Whalen, Beth Hill, Danny Madore, Lauren Weldon, and Steve Parker. I hope you’ll enjoy the issue as much as we enjoyed assembling it.
This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.