By Stefanie Brook Trout

At the end of each academic year, the current Flyway editors step down, and an eager batch of new editors rises to take their places. But what do those outgoing editors do after they are done working on Flyway? Write, of course!

So, Flyway readers, you don’t have to say goodbye to the amazing outgoing editors who assembled a beautiful print anthology, launched an elegant new website that allows you to enjoy Flyway for free, and graciously mentored the incoming folks on how to keep Flyway wonderful. You can still enjoy the fruits of their creative labors by following their work as writers.

Here are a few links to online publications by Chris Wiewiora, Lydia Melby, Lindsay Tigue, Andrew Payton, and Lindsay D’Andrea to get you started. Happy reading!

“Witamy Spodwrotem/Welcome Back” by Managing Editor Chris Wiewiora (From A River & Sound Review)

Chris says this personal essay about returning to his childhood home in Warsaw, Poland, is the first piece he wrote in Iowa State University’s MFA program. Yes, you read that right. He was this good when he got to us. “Welcome Back,” which “focuses on memory and the overlap/replacement of the present on the past,” will be a part of Chris’s thesis, a nonfiction book that I cannot wait to read after getting this sneak peek.

“Fruit” by Fiction Editor Lydia Melby (From The Austin Chronicle)

Lydia took second place in the Austin Chronicle’s 19th Annual Short Story Contest with this engrossing fiction piece. She challenged conventions by narrating “Fruit” in the second person, a difficult mode that, when done well, inserts the reader directly into the story (even if some of the revolting imagery is so vivid that you might wish you weren’t). But of course, because Lydia does it so expertly, you’ll be glad to inhabit the protagonist’s skin, brie-like puss and all.

“Linear Foreign Bodies” by Nonfiction Editor Lindsay Tigue (From Barnstorm)

Lindsay packs a lot of truth into this poem about a cat that eats elastics. “Linear Foreign Bodies” stretches the elasticity of a sentence just like the stretched rubber in the cat’s stomach. One long enjambed thought captures a meandering stream of consciousness. We see deep-seated mania, social anxiety caused by crowding, and a charming weirdness in the series of thoughts. One of the best parts of this poem is the opportunity Lindsay gave her readers to mentally punctuate the sentence in different ways, so we can experience the poem differently each time.

“Repairs” by Poetry Editor Andrew Payton (From Juked)

In a series of couplets, Andrew provides a populist narrative after the fashion of postmodernist poetry. “Repairs” parallels the images of the mechanic and the butcher, the machine and the organism. As the uncle repairs the narrator’s Pontiac (and drinks Natty Light), the aunt butchers a deer. The clipped form of the couplets imitates the whirlwind of emotion implicated in clipped, rural speech. A marked eeriness pervades the narrative as the nameless aunt and uncle nonchalantly mix oil and blood, and by the end of the poem, we begin question whether we view the natural environment as dispassionately as we do a broken down car.

“The Salt Collector” by Creative Director Lindsay D’Andrea (From InDigest Magazine)

Lindsay says it best: “The piece is about grief, and was inspired by the installations of Japanese artist, Motoi Yamamoto […]. In Japan, salt is an important part of the culture surrounding death. Sometimes, bowls of salt are featured at funerals. I set the story in a sleepy beach town in order to explore how a presence of salt might physically begin to overwhelm a grieving man’s life.” The tension of this beautiful story builds quietly as we learn more about the characters and as they learn more about their relationship. The salt evinces surrealism in the story, but we never question the realism of the characters.

And just for fun (and trust me, it’s fun), be sure to check out “Millions,” a poem written and read by Nonfiction Editor Lindsay Tigue in this short stop-motion film adaptation animated by Creative Director Lindsay D’Andrea and Flyway friend Geetha Iyer.

On behalf of the incoming staff and Flyway’s readers, I want to both thank the outgoing editors for their hard work on the journal and applaud their talent as writers.

On behalf of all of us at Flyway, thanks to you for reading!

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