Flyway – Spring/Fall 2005

This issue’s cover, graced by a cool-toned color photo of a flooded home on a river in South Dakota, is intriguing, and the writing inside eclectic. Perusing an issue of Flyway is like attending a series of author readings; each story, essay, or poem is followed by an author’s note that lets you in on what inspired the writer to write the piece, or what the work means to him or her.

This issue’s cover, graced by a cool-toned color photo of a flooded home on a river in South Dakota, is intriguing, and the writing inside eclectic. Perusing an issue of Flyway is like attending a series of author readings; each story, essay, or poem is followed by an author’s note that lets you in on what inspired the writer to write the piece, or what the work means to him or her. The poetry ranges widely in length and formality, from two sonnets by Barry Ballard, to an eight-line poem called “Summer,” by Dan Manchester, which offers a sequence of happy summer images and then makes the kind of leap one might find in a haiku: “By August, I’d collected enough / smooth rocks to load my pockets / and sink clear away.” There is work in translation by Chinese poet Bian Zhilin, and a poem in lovely couplets, “Dust,” by Dan Stryk: “The way it settles in the runnels / of the cracked oak desk, the full-grained // rondure of its woman’s calves I’ve loved…” The fiction, too, comes in a variety of styles. One of the winning fiction selections from Flyway’s Sweet Corn Literary Award competition, “The Last Kiss,” by Garrett Rowlan, tells a tale in which a man finds himself living out an alternate ending to a movie that has obsessed him for years. The other, “Wind Baby,” by Stephanie Dickinson, is a strictly realistic portrayal of the consequences of a childhood betrayal of confidence. In the sole piece of nonfiction in this volume, writer Jen Hirt riffs on meanings of the word “Stronghold” (the title of the piece) to craft a lyric memoir. With so much variety in these pages, there is surely something here for everyone. [http://flyway.org]