The yoke will spill over her small hands and she will cry, will run into her room, into the hard, blue agate of her sadness, and I will not know how to follow her. I still don't."
-Meagan Cass from Egg Toss, August 1989
This line is from a story featured in Smokelong Quarterly. Aesthetically speaking, this journal really doesn't do much for me. Something about it seems messy. Instead of putting me in the mood to read, it puts me in the mood to tidy up.
Fortunately, I fought that urge long enough to read Egg Toss, August, 1989, which was a really amazing story. Something about the line I quoted above, touched me in a way that, if you're a writer, you hope and pray that your words will touch someone, someday. It explained myself to me in a way that I didn't even realize was possible.
The writing is so good and the design of the journal is so not good that I'd have to say the two don't really match, at least not in my mind. I wouldn't expect such clean, beautiful, sparse prose to be featured based on the way that the journal looks, especially on the home page.
One feature of the journal that is nice is that each writer's story is paired with an artists rendering, although I'm not sure how this pairing works (i.e. if the story inspires the art or if the art is simply paired with a relevant story). Either way, the pages that feature the stories paired with the art, are really attractive and simple. If the rest of the journal looked the way that these pages do, I'd be in love.
It was relatively easy to find some of Meagan's other stuff since Smokelong was nice enough to feature a short bio at the end of her story and since google is nice enough to exist.
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