Unraveled Intimacies

We are thrilled to introduce Issue 3, Unraveled Intimacies.

Journey into four exquisite collections of nonfiction by Paula Gillison, Lisa Loving, Mary Jo McLaughlin, and Sema Wray, that weave in and out of the vulnerabilities, closeness, and unraveling of myriad states of intimacy.

In Paula Gillison's All the Boys, we confront issues of sexual violence, abandonment, racism, and the tragic death of a beloved child. Between the heaux and the unholy love, the matriarchal ancestry and the spirits, there's an ethereal survival quality that weaves together a life that resembles magical realism. The dreamkeepers usher you in; the holy ushers you out. This unflinching exploration of what we lose and what we gain through daring to love teaches us how to love the self and others with a mature abiding love, a rich garden of love..."We tilled the earth together until our soil was fruitful and ripe."

Lisa Loving's A Map on the Heart like a Scar from a Knife takes us deep within the many rooms of her "rotten-fruit bruised heart" into the lush, dreamlike sequences of travel from Atlanta, GA to Winston-Salem, NC. The landscapes take us through emotionally absent parents and chain-smoking Great Aunt Dottie, horrific encounters with the neighborhood bully Bubba, scuffles with tough girl Shelly, and love of good old dead cousin Larry until, at last, finding an identity and escape through books and music. Loving's prose feels compulsively readable, begging you to return to taste its sheer beauty again and again.

In The Art of Leaving, Mary Jo McLaughlin truly shows "a triumph of hope over experience," as expressed in her first vignette, Brides, when we first learn of her second wedding. With sultry, lush southern devastation, McLaughlin brings us on a search for belonging through mother-loss, mental illness, father estrangement, and finally ceremony when at last the disparate chambers of the heart are knitted back together. McLaughlin's writing reads like fine silk against bare skin in the moment before it is violently ripped away.

In Sema Wray's Unaffiliated, we follow a young woman as she enters the church, not for the love of Jesus, but for the love of a man. Wray's wry depictions of religion, hell, the devil and becoming equally yoked to her first husband make the reader gasp with hilarity and horror. As she finds her way out of, first, her parent's home, and then her strangulating marriage, she finally finds freedom with men and God, and we cheer for her with the true thrill of love and admiration. Wray's observations of the institutions of marriage and the church are understated, dead on, and utterly satisfying.

We hope you will love these four distinct explorations of unraveled intimacy as much as we did.

Enjoy!

Cindy Cunningham and Valley Haggard, Co-Editors