Editor's Notes
Rent from DeepDyve- Editor’s Notes
Since the inaugural issue of River Teeth in the fall of 1999, readers and writers of literary nonfiction have been trying to figure out what the hell we're all about. I'm sure some of this curiosity comes from nothing more than a writer trying to decide if our journal is the right place for her work. Perhaps it's assuming that we must have one political agenda or another. I hope this interest in what we do derives from admiring the work we publish and wanting to learn more about the diversity, width, and depth of contemporary literary nonfiction.
One of the nicest compliments we've received came from the writer Roger Hart, who was writing a review of us for American Literary Review a couple of years ago. Hart wrote, "If [. . .] the editors of River Teeth have a particular type of [piece] they prefer, I have been unable to figure out what it is. Their only concern seems to be with good writing [. . .] that dips below the surface in much the same way river teeth do."
A writing professor I met at an awp conference once told me that she and her students studied every issue of River Teeth trying to detect biases, agendas, prejudices, even tendencies and tastes. She informed me that she and her students could really find nothing consistent except a concern for quality writing. This cheered us, of course. And then she said something else. "If I had to pick anything at all, it would have to be a strand of loss that seems to run through every issue."
I recall chuckling with Dan Lehman over this, the two us of nodding our heads in knowing agreement that she was most likely more astute than she knew.
I have no doubt a sense of loss pervades the work we publish, as, I would argue, it pervades all of literature. Arguably all great literature is about loss in one way or another. At least all the great literature I love to read and that has sustained me over my life concerns itself with loss, losses or the lost.
But, of course, writing that merely records loss will not sustain us for long. There has to be something more. [End Page vii]
In this issue of River Teeth David Plante's excerpt from his memoir, American Ghosts, engages lost ancestry and lost faith, but what emerges from this loss is a new understanding of where he came from and where he may be headed, physically and spiritually. Jane Armstrong writes about what she has lost because of a debilitating nervous system disease in her essay, "The Year You Learn about Happiness." And yet it's what she has gained from this loss that surprises the reader. "You hear yourself saying words that you never before uttered without irony or contempt: forgiveness, redemption, peace, delight."
Writer Dustin Beall Smith's memoir, "Starting at the Bottom Again," deals with something like the original sin of loss, something primal, an emptiness that has existed within him for years and years, an emptiness as deep as his marrow. By forcing himself to face a frightening spiritual journey undertaken by Native Americans, Dusty writes of how while on this journey he understood, among other things, that "Time was an unstoppable escalator, how I wouldn't be able to find friends and family again, how my son died long before my father did, how Death was just a curtain, and that maybe it isn't all over when we die."
The writing of Lynda Rutledge and D. L. Hall—about the fatal car accidents that claimed members of their respective families—somehow overcomes these tragic losses and gives us a glimpse into what exists beyond and through such losses.
In her own bizarre way Sue William Silverman writes about feeling the loss of the idealized American family in her nonfiction drama, "I Was a Prisoner on the Satellite of Love."
Because I am writing these notes in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina perhaps I can be forgiven for feeling a bit weak, a tad sad and sentimental, with loss and hope not far from my mind. We...
