A face in the public domain
From Tom Dooley, Managing/Fiction
This week I started remodeling an investment home. Besides explaining why this editor note will be uncharacteristically short, the project has reminded me how much I love the remodeling process—for many of the same reasons I love putting together an issue of Eclectica. Growing up in rural Alaska, I took to heart the advice, "Leave the campsite in better shape than you found it." Constructing, salvaging, finding, refining, and as the icing on the cake, revealing. There's a lot of joy in all that for me. So here's to another spring issue, and to Spotlight winner J.V. Foerster (poetry) and runners-up Sara Flemington (fiction) and Marlene Olin (nonfiction). A special shout out to Thomas J. Hubschman for contributing two essays to the Salon, both of which are great, one of which, "The Giraffe's Long Neck, or Why Margaret Still Grieves," might just be my favorite of Tom's ever. I hope our contributors and readers will enjoy everything this issue has to offer.
From Marko Fong, Nonfiction
This issue's non-fiction section includes two memoirs that ultimately explore the notion of "home." Marlene Olin's "Happy" starts with a neighbor looking for a lost dog near the writer's summer home in Wyoming. It quickly becomes a meditation on COVID, our connection to our pets as they age, our own aging process, an adult daughter on the autism spectrum, and how we establish a sense of "home" in ways that have nothing to do with a physical structure by seeking for "Happy."
Marisa Cadena's memoir of a second stay in Oaxaca in the year 2000 many years after a more superficial visit as a teen.This time she truly wants to know the city and its people by eating the way the locals eat, working there, sustaining friendships, and mastering the local language instead of textbook Spanish. In the process, Oaxaca becomes a home, albeit a temporary one, instead of a destination.
From Evan Martin Richards, Poetry
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