Opening Letters > From the Editors
Amidst the depth of this winter, we find ourselves living through unprecedented times. Whenever we find ourselves exhausted from chasing long shadows on short days—whenever we find ourselves losing hope—our contributors remind us of just how resilient language can make the human animal. The power of words to reflect, define, and create the reality in which we live is never lost on them. Reading their work allows us to travel backward through time, to be truly present in the singular now, and to imagine an infinite array of possible futures. It allows us to escape the grasp of these difficult days, but it also allows us to embrace them and live them more fully. Their collective work—much like this issue’s cover photo by Diane Raven—provides us with a portal through which we may step. Choosing to do so allows us to live beyond the limits of our corporeal experience. Choosing to do so reveals the depth of humanity’s potential. Choosing to do so gives us hope.
Whether you're new to Sky Island Journal, or you're already one of our 55,000 readers in 145 countries, we know you’ll find something in this edition to nourish your inner fire as the temperature outside drops. In these unprecedented times, hope favors the brave, and the contributors of Issue 11 are about as fearless as they come.
Of the 1,295 individual pieces that we received from around the world for Issue 11, we found these 32 to be the finest. Welcome to Sky Island. Welcome home.
Respectfully,
Jason Splichal, Founder and Co-Editor
Following the flurry of activity that spans the month of December and sweeps into the first weeks of January, I'm really trying to focus. I feel like it's becoming increasingly difficult to settle into nearly anything these days. Just ask my patient wife: I'll walk into a room, turn around, look left, look right, furrow my brow and ask, "What am I looking for?" It's even worse when I'm using the Internet. I'll open a browser on one of my devices. I swear I have a clear agenda in mind. Sometimes, I'm trying to see if any of my favorite bands are coming to town soon or to take care of some online banking or to simply check the weather. The next thing I know, I've read and deleted countless emails, scrolled headlines, scanned Twitter feeds, clicked on links (sometimes on purpose, sometimes because my fingers literally cannot avoid them in the middle of the article I'm trying to read), and before I know it I've completely forgotten why I opened the browser in the first place. Nearly ten years ago, Nicholas Carr wrote extensively about similar cognitive challenges in his book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and while it's likely that Shakespeare never imagined a world with Smartphones, tablets, and laptops, perhaps this is what he meant when he had Hamlet speak about "the distracted globe."
The bottom line is that I have to be truly intentional when I need to focus. Without a doubt, it’s always worth the effort, especially when immersing myself in tremendous works of literature. We have been equally intentional with the format of this journal. By design, each published piece of writing in Sky Island Journal opens as a protected Word document for an authentic, focused, and immersive experience that encourages a close, intimate, distraction-free reading of the work. Readers, we want your experience with each contributor's work to be singular: just as it would be on the printed page, with crisp white paper between your collective fingertips. With no advertising on our website, we hope it allows you to fully engage in the works we've so carefully curated for you. With no subscription fees, you are welcome whenever you have time to stop by.
Now, look left, look right, settle in, and I ask, "What are you looking for?" If you're looking to be transported intellectually and moved emotionally, I think you might just find what you're seeking here in Issue 11 of Sky Island Journal.
Enjoy! We're happy you're here.
Respectfully,
Jeff Sommerfeld, Founder and Co-Editor
Angelica Liu > Poetry > China
Angelica Liu resides and works as a teacher in Hangzhou, China. Even though a native Chinese speaker, she has a great affinity for the descriptive power of written English. As a consequence, even though she has never been to an English-speaking country, she has a passion for writing in English and writes primarily for an English-speaking audience. She has a myriad of interests, but tends toward such topics as metaphysics, the nature of love, the quantum universe, and the beauty of the natural world. She can often be found in a coffee shop, her writing pad open and a cup of coffee within easy reach. She is greatly honored to appear in Sky Island Journal.
Bonnie Wehle > Poetry > Arizona, USA
Bonnie Wehle’s work has been published in Valley Voices, The Avocet, Sandcutters Poetry Journal of the Arizona State Poetry Society, and in online journals including the bilingual Metaforología Gaceta Literaria. Bonnie lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she serves as a docent at University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Charlene Stegman Moskal > Poetry > Nevada, USA
Charlene Stegman Moskal is a Teaching Artist with The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project and a Fellow of the New Jersey Writing Project. For three decades prior to moving to Las Vegas, Nevada, she taught in public schools in South Texas. She has been published in numerous anthologies, magazines, and journals—most recently, The Esthetic Apostle, Cosmographia, Cathexis Northwest, Sky Island Journal, and Southwestern American Literature, among others. Zeitgeist Press is the publisher of her second chapbook, One Bare Foot.
Dia Roth > Poetry > Washington, USA
Dia Roth is a queer poet and youth worker. She enjoys being partially submerged in bodies of water, rivers and oceans in particular. She lives in Seattle, Washington with her partner and dog. Sky Island Journal is her first literary publication.
Dick Altman > Poetry > New Mexico, USA
Dick Altman lives on the high desert plain of New Mexico. His work has run in the Santa Fe Literary Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Almagre Review, riverSedge, Split Rock Review, Blueline, RavensPerch, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere in the U.S., England and Australia. He won first prize for poetry in the Santa Fe New Mexican’s 2015 writing competition. He holds an MA in English from the University of Chicago.
Ford McDonald > Poetry > Texas, USA
Ford McDonald is an engineer and aspiring writer. His poems have appeared in Texas’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology and Texas Christian University’s Journal of the Arts: eleven40seven. He currently resides in Fort Worth, Texas.
Helen Beer > Flash Fiction > North Carolina, USA
Helen Beer sells for a living. She’s had success in short story contests, with multiple placements in both Moondance Film Festival and the Screencraft Cinematic Short Story competitions. Two of her feature length screenplays have reached the quarterfinal rounds of Scriptapalooza and Screencraft drama screenplay contests. Her fiction and non-fiction prose has appeared in Literary Potpourri, FRiGG, Typishly, Flash Fiction Magazine, Persimmon Tree, The First Line, 101 Words, Sky Island Journal, and STORGY Magazine, with upcoming pieces in Haunted Waters Press – From the Depths, and Defenestration. When not working or writing, she enjoys the Zen-like tranquility afforded by time spent riding her horse and mucking stalls.
James K. Zimmerman > Poetry > New York, USA
James K. Zimmerman is a frequent Pushcart Prize nominee and award-winning poet – most recently the Edwin Markham Prize and the Pat Schneider Award. His work appears in Pleiades, Chautauqua, American Life in Poetry, Vallum, Nimrod, Sky Island Journal, and Reed, among others. He is the author of Little Miracles (Passager, 2015) and Family Cookout (Comstock, 2016), winner of the 2015 Jessie Bryce Niles Prize.
Joia Karen Holman > Poetry > HAWAII, USA
Joia Karen Holman is a naturalist, energy healer, photographer, and writer with a deep love for wilderness and a resonance with wild animals. Born in New Orleans, she grew up mostly in London and Paris. Seeking out some of the most remote places on Earth, Joia has worked with endangered Hawaiian monk seals on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, blue monkeys in Kenya, elephants in Sri Lanka, river dolphins in Cambodia, and dugongs in Australia. She is a crew member aboard Hōkūle’a, a Polynesian voyaging canoe navigated by the stars. Joia is a seasoned sailor and has voyaged across the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea, both on conventional sailing vessels and by way of traditional, deep sea voyaging canoes. She currently lives in Hawaii, where she is working on a memoir of poetry and imagery, in hopes to help awaken humanity’s relationship to all life as sacred and interconnected.
Karin Hedetniemi > Creative Nonfiction > Canada
Karin Hedetniemi writes essays about nature, inspiration, and being human. Sky Island Journal is her first publication in a literary journal. She also has poetry forthcoming in Pomme Journal. Karin originally studied humanities then followed a winding path to nonprofit management in environmental education. Now dedicated to new life experiences, she recently traveled to Ireland, France, and Italy, and walked two Camino pilgrimage trails in Spain. Her home in Victoria, British Columbia, is filled with travel, gardening, spiritual, and bird books, and a lifetime of notes evolving into stories.
Kat Heatherington > Poetry > New Mexico, USA
Kat Heatherington is a queer ecofeminist poet, sometime artist, pagan, and organic gardener. She lives south of Albuquerque, New Mexico in Sunflower River intentional community. Kat’s work primarily addresses the interstices of human relationships and the natural world. She has one book, The Bones of This Land, printed by Swimming with Elephants Publications in fall 2017, available on Amazon and through SwEP, as well as several self-published chapbooks.
Linda H.Y. Hegland > Creative Nonfiction > Canada
Linda H.Y. Hegland is an award-winning lyric essay, creative nonfiction and poetry writer, and photographer who lives in the rural paradise of Clarence, Nova Scotia. Both her writing and photos most often reflect the influence of place, and one’s complex and reciprocal relationship with it. She has published in numerous literary and art journals and has had work nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her book of poems, Bird Slips, Moon Glows, (Cyberwit Press) was published in December of 2019.
M.E. Hope > Poetry > Illinois, USA
M.E. Hope has been a recipient of a Fishtrap Fellowship, Playa Residency, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. She currently lives in a town on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, near Saint Louis. She lives with her husband of 33 years and has a cat who is 21; both of these facts delight her on a daily basis.
Mario Duarte > Flash Fiction > Iowa, USA
Mario Duarte is a Senior Academic Advisor at the University of Iowa and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems and short stories have appeared in aaduna, Chicago Literati, Hinchas de Poesía, Huizache, Lunch Ticket, Pank, Pilgrimage, RavensPerch, Rigorous, Storyscape, Typishly, and Write Launch.
Marla Eizik > Flash Fiction > Oregon, USA
Marla Eizik creates next to a park in Portland, Oregon that an old man once told her was full of fairies. This magic imbues her short story pieces and speculative fiction. She works daily toward getting published and reads too many books as an executive assistant at Image Comics.
Maurice Devitt > Poetry > Ireland
Winner of the 2015 Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition, Maurice Devitt has been runner-up or shortlisted in Listowel, Cuirt, Patrick Kavanagh, Interpreter’s House and Cork Literary Review. He is curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site, chairperson of the Hibernian Writers’ Group, and has recently published his debut collection, Growing Up in Colour, with Doire Press.
Michael Garrigan > Poetry > Pennsylvania, USA
Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He enjoys exploring the river’s many tributaries with a fly rod and hiking the riverlands with his wife, Jess, and dog, Whitman. He is the author of the chapbook What I Know [How to Do] (Finishing Line Press) and Robbing the Pillars, his first full-length collection forthcoming from Homebound Publications in July 2020. His essays and poems have appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal, The Wayfarer, Rust & Moth, The Drake Magazine, Hawk & Handsaw, Sky Island Journal, and Split Rock Review.
Mistee St. Clair > Poetry > Alaska, USA
Mistee St. Clair was born and raised in Alaska, with a few years here and there in other parts of the Pacific Northwest. She’s been published by the Fairbanks Arts Association, the Anchorage Daily News, Tidal Echoes, Cirque, Sky Island Journal, and more. She loves to get out of town, or out into the woods, and somehow spends an absurd amount of time in the kitchen. Currently she lives, writes, mothers and hikes in beautiful, foggy Juneau.
Natasha Deonarain > Poetry > Arizona, USA + Colorado, USA
Natasha Deonarain is a medical doctor and lives part-time between Arizona and Colorado. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Rogue Agent Journal, The RavensPerch, and Door is Ajar among others. She examines the borders between spirituality, medical practice, and the ever-changing environment, along with contemplating how 'primum non nocere' is often violated.
Phebe Jewell > Flash Fiction > Washington, USA
Phebe Jewell's recent work appears in Monkeybicycle, Spelk, Literary Heist, Maudlin House, Dime Show Review, Sky Island Journal, and other publications. A teacher at Seattle Central College, she also volunteers for the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a nonprofit providing college courses for women in prison.
Piet Nieuwland > Poetry > New Zealand
Piet Nieuwland lives near Whangarei, New Zealand. His poems and flash fiction appear in many places in print and online including Bonsai, Geometry, Brief, Catalyst, Nga Kupu Waikato and The Fine Line in New Zealand; Pure Slush, Otoliths and Cordite Australia; Blue Fifth Review, Mojave River Review, Lunch Ticket, Sky Island Journal, and Atlanta Review in USA; RevuePost in Canada, The Wild Word from Germany, and Sonic Boom and Erothanatos in India. His poem, “The Melting Sky,” appears in the inaugural Antarctic Poetry Exhibition. He edits Fast Fibres Poetry and reviews poetry for Takahe.
Richard LeBlond > Creative Nonfiction > North Carolina, USA
Richard LeBlond is a retired biologist living in North Carolina. His essays and photographs have appeared in numerous U.S. and international journals, including Montreal Review, High Country News, Compose, New Theory, Lowestoft Chronicle, Concis, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and Sky Island Journal. His work has been nominated for “Best American Travel Writing” and “Best of the Net.”
Richard Lebovitz > Poetry > Georgia, USA
After earning his M.F.A. from UNC-Greensboro and M.A. from UNC-Chapel Hill, Richard Lebovitz taught college in Idaho and high school in North Carolina before entering the career path that led him to become responsible for the editorial direction of several Atlanta-based award-winning consumer and B2B magazines. Since exiting the business world, he has devoted his time to rescuing Georgia native plants from the path of development, helping create a demonstration wildlife habitat garden in a local park and nurturing the certified native plant and wildlife habitat in his small backyard. His interest in the relationship between humans and nature is reflected in many of his poems, some of which have appeared most recently in Canary, The Curlew, POEM, The RavensPerch, Town Creek Review and Broad River Review, for which he was a finalist for the 2017 Rash Award in Poetry.
Richard Spilman > Poetry > West Virginia, USA
Richard Spilman is the author of two collections of poetry: In the Night Speaking and Suspension. He has also published two books of short stories, including the New York Times Notable Book Hot Fudge. He grew up in Normal, Illinois, and now lives with his novelist wife, Joan, and two grandsons in Hurricane, West Virginia.
Rosalie Sanara Petrouske > Poetry > Michigan, USA
Rosalie Sanara Petrouske’s poetry and essays have appeared in Passages North, Southern Poetry Review, Rhino, American Nature Writing, Lunch Ticket, and Third Wednesday, as well as many anthologies. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry from Finishing Line Press: What We Keep and A Postcard from My Mother. Images of the natural world are prominent throughout her work as she stays true to the teachings of her Ojibwe father, who taught her how to provide careful stewardship and to always honor her surrounding environment, whether a woodland or urban landscape.
Samantha Madway > Poetry > Pennsylvania, USA
Samantha Madway is working on a collection of interlinked poems and flash fiction. She loves her dogs, Freddie, Charlie, Parker, Greta, and Davey, more than anything else in the universe. She’s technophobic but attempts to be brave by having an Instagram @sometimesnight. If the profile were a plant, it would’ve died long ago. Her writing has appeared in Sky Island Journal, Clementine Unbound, SLAB, unstamatic, Flexible Persona, After the Pause, and elsewhere.
Sandra Shaw Homer > Poetry > Costa Rica
Sandra Shaw Homer has lived in Costa Rica for 29 years, where she has taught languages and worked as a translator and environmental activist. In addition to her writing in the local press, her creative non-fiction, flash fiction, and poetry have appeared in several print and on-line literary and travel venues. Her first travel memoir, Letters from the Pacific, received excellent Kirkus and Publishers Weekly reviews. A brief memoir of survival, The Magnificent Dr. Wao, is available as a Kindle Book, and a second travel memoir, Journey to the Joie de Vivre takes you on two trans-Atlantic freighters and a swing through Europe. Her latest book, Evelio’s Garden: Memoir of a Naturalist in Costa Rica, has just been published.
Sandy Coomer > Poetry > Tennessee, USA
Sandy Coomer is a poet, artist, Ironman athlete, and social entrepreneur from Nashville, Tennessee. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks and a full-length collection, Available Light (Iris Press). Sandy is a poetry mentor in the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship Program and the founding editor of the online poetry journal, Rockvale Review. She is the founder and director of Rockvale Writers’ Colony in College Grove, Tennessee, a not-for-profit organization that exists to support, promote, and educate writers of all genres and backgrounds. Her favorite word is “believe.”
Scudder Parker > Poetry > Vermont, USA
Scudder Parker grew up on a family farm in North Danville, Vermont. He’s been a Protestant minister, State Senator, utility regulator, candidate for Governor, consultant on energy efficiency and renewable energy, and is settling into his ongoing work as a poet. He’s a passionate gardener and proud grandfather of four. He and his wife, Susan, live in Middlesex, Vermont. Scudder has published in Sun Magazine, Vermont Life, Northern Woodlands, Wordrunner, Passager, Eclectica, Twyckenham, Crosswinds, Ponder Review, La Presa, and Aquifer.
Tucker Riggleman > Poetry > West Virginia, USA
Tucker Riggleman is a musician and poet in love with the woods and water of his home, West Virginia. His work has been featured in the Travelin’ Appalachians Revue zines, The Good News Paper, Fluent Magazine, and in his self-published poetry collection, Japanese Maple.