A Letter from the Editor
Dear Barnstorm readers, followers, and friends,
It's a truly wonderful thing to present our October release: Issue 1 of Barnstorm Volume 15.
Yes, that's fifteen years of Barnstorm!
As we ring in this milestone, we foremost want to acknowledge the years of exceptional writers and artists who have trusted Barnstorm with their work. Please take a look at our Library of all past 14 Volumes - I promise you’ll love these works as much as we do.
Fifteen years of Barnstorm has us both recollecting and looking ahead! We have exciting news to share (a poetry festival?), big projects coming soon (other events!?), and as always a selection of vibrant new prose, poetry, and visual artworks for you to be captivated by just as we have.
For this first Issue of Volume 15, our Editors and their readers have curated a trio of literary works that illuminate the emotions we pin to the inanimate and the mundane, all while offering some insight as to how we can move forward in the world today.
Our featured short fiction "Thrift" by Jennifer Fliss calls on the tensions of childhood memories paired to the foils of retail staff and 1970s clown portraiture.
Anna Molenaar's essay "Birds That Do Not Matter" offers unorthodox ornithology, engaging form, and an illumination of the expectations entailed by the human condition.
And our (quite timely) featured poem "Early October" by Hannah Silverstein illustrates the complexity of human intervention to the natural landscape.
Paired respectively to visual artworks by Aidan Doyle, Johnson Luong, and Jean Wolff, Volume 15: Issue 1 highlights literature and art that speaks freely on what it means to be aware of the world around us.
Speaking of the world around us, you may have noticed some new submission categories featured on our Submittable page - the contests of the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival (April 12-14, 2024) at the University of New Hampshire. While the Poetry Festival is a fully separate production from Barnstorm Journal (Barnstorm's editors are not involved in the judging of these contests), we're sibling projects in the UNH English Department! We'll be collaborating more with the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival over its inaugural year, so we hope you'll take a look at the generously-prized contests, the Festival events, and all else they’re doing in support of poetry, creative writing, and small-press publishing.
While we celebrate this new Poetry Festival, I can’t help but consider how reaching the fifteenth anniversary is momentous for any literary journal. This milestone would not have been imaginable without the support of our readers; the investment of our submitting writers, poets, and artists; and the line of Barnstorm Editors I’m humbled to follow, welcoming our next Editors with excitement (more on that soon).
With this, we also owe sincere gratitude to our readers and to all who submit their work to Barnstorm. To quote our EIC of Volume 13, Elise Wallace: “Our ambitious little journal would not be possible without you. It has been a pleasure to read such compelling work; our editorial team has been tasked with some extremely difficult decisions.” Each Volume’s editorial team shares this sentiment, and we’re honored to have so many of you consider Barnstorm as a home for you work.
Here at Barnstorm, we're thrilled to have you, lovely readers, here with us to celebrate fifteen consecutive yearly Volumes publishing the best fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artworks that are playful, take risks, and harness energy.
But what does our tagline mean, exactly?
As milestones naturally lead to recollection, let's take a look at some history: Barnstorm was founded in 2009 as a graduate course in the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of New Hampshire. The course sought to give MFA students a hands-on understanding of the literary publishing world by establishing and staffing an independent journal. A few years later, the classroom side was no longer, but Barnstorm Journal continued.
Today, Barnstorm is sponsored by the UNH MFA Creative Writing program and operates as a fully independent online literary journal staffed, edited, and published entirely by MFA Creative Writing graduate students. And while these fifteen years of Barnstorm have seen many changes - 2 websites, 3 submission systems, 7 publishing schedules, 83 staff editors, and 252-and-counting published works of creative writing, to name a few - Barnstorm's foundational throughline will always remain: a little thing I've been calling “The Barnstorm Ethos."
It's the drive to be a platform for innovative literature, artworks, and more that are exciting, enticing, quality, and accessible. It's the writing that makes you realize you've been holding your breath, the poems that jolt you awake to some unexpected awareness, the stories and scenes and visuals bringing us genuine heartache and laughter.
Barnstorm aims as a literary publication to do the same as our featured writers and artists do in their work: be playful, take risks, and harness energy. Try something new, say something meaningful, and… well, I’ll let our featured works speak for themselves.
We're excited to present Barnstorm Volume 15, carrying the "Barnstorm Ethos" forward with Issue 1, featuring three fabulous new works of literature by Jennifer Fliss, Anna Molenaar, and Hannah Silverstein; and three entrancing works of visual art by Aidan Doyle, Johnson Luong, and Jean Wolff.
Please, come on in and take a seat with your favorite drink for a moment with these pieces.
We hope you enjoy.
With words and well-wishes,
Mason M. Cashman
Editor in Chief, Barnstorm Journal