From Tom Dooley, Managing/Fiction
If you're going to wrap up a 30th anniversary year, this is the way to do it. Christine continues to serve up an embarrassment of riches in the poetry section; Marko's nonfiction section is on point, including two pieces that scratch valiantly at the surface of the ever intractable conflict in the Middle East; and yeah, there's some good (and timely) stuff in the fiction section as well. I nominated Heather Pegas' "I Opened the Window" in part for her beautiful writing and also for the relevance of a "Spanish" flu story in our post-Covid era. Only four stories this go round, but they're tight, solid, and impactful.
For those who are following our 30th Anniversary anthology effort, we have five volumes in the galley stage: Best Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, Speculative, and Long Form. Forewords have been provided or are soon to arrive from Chika Unigwe, Svetlana Lavochkina, Stephen Bunch, A.S. King, and Susann Cokal, respectively, all of whom have been incredibly generous with their time and sentiments. We'll be launching a Kickstarter campaign soon, which will pay for the contributor's copies and teeshirts, and will also give our extended family of readers, authors, and supporters a chance to buy their copies in a manner where their money goes to contributors and not Amazon's coffers. Keep an eye on our Facebook pages for news of further developments.
Speaking of developments and our Facebook pages, that's a great way to keep track of some of our alumni's successes, including the latest news on Ron Currie's We Will See You Bleed. Not content with another critically acclaimed book release, he also spent the summer in Los Angeles spearheading the writers' room for the Netflix series adaptation of his hit 2025 novel, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne. Meanwhile, Caroline Kepnes' new bestseller You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel, came out this summer as well, and she is working on her directorial debut, adapting her 2022 short story "The Attentionist" into an eight-episode premium short-form series for YouTube. Best wishes to Ron and Caroline and all the folks out there putting in work.
Ordinarily, we like to have some kind of art to accompany the written word in Eclectica, and this issue was not supposed to be an exception. Last month, I had the privilege of going to the Musée National Marc Chagall in Nice, France, where I took a lot of pictures, thinking I would be able to use small snippets of that artist's fantastic work. It didn't even occur to me there are folks out there enforcing a remarkably strict copyright on Chagall's work, but indeed, they are. He seems like such a timeless big deal, it's weird to realize he only passed away when I was in high school, and while that was quite awhile ago, it's not long enough for public domain to kick in. Would they (essentially, a collections agency for such things) come after a no-profit online magazine for using tiny "excerpts" of larger paintings in a free, literary setting? Hard to say, but it looks like they would want upwards of 100 euros a month into perpetuity. I'm going to see if I can get permission for what I'm trying to do, and if that happens, this issue will be a lot more colorful. In the meantime, we'll have to let the writing and the personalities of our authors do the coloring for us.
I hope everyone enjoys reading this issue as much as we did putting it together, and here's to closing out 2026 on a positive note. Be safe out there!
From Marko Fong, Nonfiction
This issue's batch felt especially random. There are three slice of life stories from senior citizens along with a movie review from a high school senior. Two longer articles are serious discussions of violence in the Middle East sit next to a light-hearted look at various historical figures. Two others are deeply personal and reflective. A theme emerged nonetheless: things just aren't that simple.
Our spotlight feature is Sam Reichman's "In the Arab West." It's a challenging read as the work and life of the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab threads through Reichman's experiences as an American Jew visiting the West Bank. He speaks Arabic and encounters the complexities of the conflict in Lebanon, questioning whether nationalism—whether in the Middle East or in the US—by its nature excludes and antagonizes. Richard Fields' "Give Them Any Reason to Celebrate" is a first person account of being near a terrorist incident in Israel from a non-Jewish American lawyer who spent parts of his career representing victims of terrorism without, to that point, knowing what it felt like up close. Do we have all possible perspectives here on a topic that almost always generates hundreds of emotionally-charged posts (too often from posters with limited expertise) whenever it comes up in social media? Absolutely, not. We welcome other takes in the future, but both pieces do bring out the fear and the complexity at the heart of the conflicts.
To be honest, we get a lot of submissions from older writers. Some of it is simply that older people have more time to write and less need to get paid for their time spent writing and submitting. Bev Jackson recounts the inner-doubts that come with a late in life traffic accident then triumphantly reverses course as mastery of new technology trumps fear of creeping dementia. Chris Ringwalt shares a visit with a peer who's been largely abandoned to a memory care unit. Curtis Morgan looks back on a second marriage to a woman haunted by her first marriage.
Vedant Gupta's review of the Netflix Bollywood-meets-American-college-life movie "Best of the Best" opens a window to a South Asian college culture built around competitive dance teams instead of med school admissions.
Adrienne Perry's "Center of My Universe" transforms a single aperitif in a Paris restaurant when she was a young adult into an exploration of the legacy of an alcoholic father who also more than that and the impact of growing up on the wrong side of Cheyenne, Wyoming. It's beautifully written. Finally, Salvatore Difalco shares weird bits of trivia about the dead and famous; I honestly wasn't sure if they were real or spoofs (at least some of them are quite real).
In the end, nothing's as simple as we want it to be.
From Christine Potter, Poetry
Spoiler Alert: Love, Love, Love
As I wrote the editor's notes for this fall's Eclectica, I kept getting blown away by how extraordinary this crop of poems is. There are surprises on every page. I keep thinking I should stamp "Spoiler Alert" on top of this article so everyone can have the experience I did selecting work: I kept shaking my head and saying "Holy cow!"
It's not often a poem announces "You Absolutely Have To Start With Me" so plainly as Shoshauna's Shy's "DO NOT CC A POET ELEVEN REASONS YOU WANT TO HIRE A HIT MAN." I'll offer a twelfth reason: the result of that CC might end up kicking off the Eclectica Fall 2026 poetry section. We've got a nice set of bookends this time, too: the main part of the section ends with a poem about a rejection slip by Yvonne Morris. "Rejection" dared me to reject it, but I'd have been a total fool. I can promise you that those two poems are really good, really fun—and also that everything in between them is every bit as wonderful.
I wrote these words in early September; it takes us a while to mark up and publish an issue. And so you must understand that I kept getting distracted and needing to go online to listen to songs by Dolly Parton that I'd somehow missed (like "Down from Dover!"). Like too many of us in this beaten-up country, I had no idea how much light that woman radiated—how much love, really. After my third Dolly break of the day, I realized what was going on: when you create poetry (or songs or any art, really), it is essentially an act of love. You have to love something to put it in a poem, even if you're also furious with it. Love is complicated and necessary and we've been drowning in hate.
So here you go. Here's love, and lots of it: Kenneth Pobo loves pinball, especially "High Speed Pinball," the name of his poem this time. And his focus, his act of creation, rewards him with the knowledge that "attention is sand. Water/runs over it and carries it away." Stephen Bunch pays attention to highway signs and in "Gas/Eats/Liquor/Ammo Ahead" realizes that "telephones and computers have begun speaking in tongues." Poetry is the gift of noticing, the gift of caring enough about even un-beautiful things to honor them by writing them down and transforming them.
Even Shelley Stoehr's poem "Stage Debt, " about the brutal system that keeps exotic dancers onstage, is that kind of sharply observed. Even Hilary Sideris' three poems, two of which are about divorce and its aftermath are like that. I especially love "Knob," in which a dangerous old stove becomes a metaphor for a marriage that needs to be dissolved: what can be fixed, what can't be fixed, and what goes up in flames on the way out.
Jim Zola gives us the love of fathers and sons in "Attending a Workshop with a Famous Poet." And Svetlana Litvinchuk gives us an intricately observed poem about a woman who "crochets a home for her home" in "My Mother Was a Spider." Speaking of mothers, check out Corrine Noel Knapps's poem full of love and redemption that opens "I agree, everything is broken. But what if breaking is the way to get where we're going?" "There Is No Fix" uses butterflies for a metaphor, possibly the only time I have ever seen that done in a poem that also steers utterly clear of cliché. (And oh, rats, now we're back to Dolly Parton...)
Juan Pablo Mobili, who is becoming a regular in this high-class establishment, gives us a pair of wise, lovingly-observed poems, "The Gift of Winter" and "Dear Revolution." And Ken Holland's "Presence of Mind" shows us how love opens the door to the future!
The poems that elicited the loudest "Holy cow" from me this time were by Phillip Shabazz: "Silt, Salt, and Yes" and "Mud Wind" are both post-disaster poems, set after a terrible flood, so they are also quite timely. And talk about loving attention to detail! Both are so vivid they breathe on the page, and "Silt, Salt, and Yes" is up there with the finest love poems I've read. What a joy to find those poems in the queue!
The Word Challenge Poems were great this time also. David Mathews' "Small Mercies" takes our four fall-issue words (orchestra, zip, truth, and shrinking) and spins what they evoke into a poem that is both memoir and aubade. I especially love his morning images as the late father drives a blue Camaro through "some ghost kingdom" while outside, in the real world, the birds and the engine noise of a kneeling bus start up the dawn chorus. (And isn't Parton's "Nine to Five" an aubade, too? Okay, I'll stop now. Promise). I was impressed also by newcomer Donna Miele's "Dear Lupus" poem that uses our challenge words to address its narrator's autoimmune disorder.
What a good batch this time! Let fall begin!
And pssst: want to join the next Word Challenge? The Winter Issue words are inverted, filigree, glitter, and light. Weave them into any kind of poem and send it in through our Word Challenge portal—where there's never a reading fee. Hope to see you there!
