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Keyhole Magazine – Spring 2008

Issue 3

Spring 2008

Quarterly

Josh Maday

Keyhole 3 opens with Shellie Zacharia’s story “Stitch,” where the narrator obsesses over whether her sewing instructor may in fact be a girl from grade school whose stitches she touched on a school bus dare. The story contains the swirl of emotions that a moment from the past often evokes: the anxiety about whether that is the same person, and whether that person remembers that one moment of cruelty you indulged at their expense, the need to defend one’s childhood self, and, ultimately, the remorse and the desire to let the past be the past, hoping that the scar of that one act healed quickly and vanished.

Keyhole 3 opens with Shellie Zacharia’s story “Stitch,” where the narrator obsesses over whether her sewing instructor may in fact be a girl from grade school whose stitches she touched on a school bus dare. The story contains the swirl of emotions that a moment from the past often evokes: the anxiety about whether that is the same person, and whether that person remembers that one moment of cruelty you indulged at their expense, the need to defend one’s childhood self, and, ultimately, the remorse and the desire to let the past be the past, hoping that the scar of that one act healed quickly and vanished.

In Mahagin’s poem “Pop Song,” he attempts to find accurate words and images to embody the “blue note in [his] bloodstream” because “its sound, a little hard to pin down, halfway / between a bullet ricochet on spaghetti western, / and the glissando screech / of a starving gull” and “ yet not necessarily in the key / of Nasty Nell with nails on chalkboard, / or Clint Eastwood in hounds tooth / jacket, snarling: MakeMyDay.” And in “Jacks with Creeley,” the narrator is schooled at Jacks by a Robert Creeley who is possibly a vitamin junkie.

Tim Keppel’s story “Pilgrimage” is told by the main character, who invites Blake, a friend of his late cousin Sonny’s, to his home in Colombia. Immediately he regrets his offer. Blake is a pot-smoking lawyer who is a potentially volatile mix of openness and aggression. The interview with Keppel gives readers insight into his process and the evolution of the story.

Rosanne Griffeth employs potent visceral language to create the emotional energy driving her four short-shorts. The characters in Griffeth’s stories, while often gritty and mean and stubborn, are also hurt and lonely and capable of tenderness. Also doing their part to make this issue a cover-to-cover read are Joshua Diamond, Elizabeth Ellen, Monica Kilian and Brian Brown.

In his opening remarks, editor Peter Cole discusses different arguments about the proper focus of a short story – plot versus character development – and he says, “I remain unconvinced of either extreme being superior, although I would argue that it is damned near impossible to present an intriguing plot without developing a memorable character or two along the way.” Then he comes to the word “entertainment”: “But I can’t imagine a piece of art that does not entertain on some level, whether it is the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, or a painting by Picasso. If it fails to entertain, it fails as art. And for me, entertainment not only includes the experience of the initial encounter, but also the lingering thoughts that a truly good piece of art leaves in my mind for hours and days to come.” For me, every story and poem in this issue of Keyhole meets these criteria.

 Keyhole’s inaugural issue (now out of print, but available online for free) announced the arrival of a quality literary publication and each subsequent issue has confirmed that this young but maturing magazine is well worth reading and supporting.
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