Flyway – Spring/Fall 2003

Flyway is one of those literary magazines that you wish the better financed, sleeker, but ultimately less earnest journals would try harder to imitate.

Flyway is one of those literary magazines that you wish the better financed, sleeker, but ultimately less earnest journals would try harder to imitate. This Spring/Fall issue charms from front to back, starting upon very sure feet with the work of Gina Ochsner. Ochsner’s stories (two of them here) are so full of deadpan beauty and ragtag miracles that they could make a magical realism enthusiast out of the most cynical realist. As an added bonus, an interview with Oschner follows her work. In a beautiful and disturbing essay, “Consuming,” Sima Rabinowitz plumbs the murky deeps of anorexia with grace and style. Artfully embracing the wider lexicology of her title, she manages at once an intensely personal confession and an appropriately detached appraisal of cultural mores. “Not even the shame of knowing there are people who are truly, deeply, honestly hungry just miles from where I work so diligently at not enjoying the food in my cupboards, does not curb my capacity for starving thoughts.” Another alluring fixture of Flyway is the inclusion of brief comments from the author or poet at the end of each piece. Despite the ubiquitous typographical errors in this issue, it is clear that the folks at Flyway care deeply for good literature. [Flyway, 206 Ross Hall, Dept. of English, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $8. http://www.engl.iastate.edu/publications/flyway/homepage.html] – MC