Behind the Issue: UpSpring (Yellow Arrow Journal, Vol. VII, No. 1)
By Rebecca Pelky
When the Editor-in-Chief of Yellow Arrow Publishing, Kapua Iao, first contacted me about possibly guest-editing Yellow Arrow Journal, Vol. VII, No. 1, UpSpring, available in the Yellow Arrow bookstore and from most online distributors, I was humbled and a little overwhelmed. It was right at the beginning of a new semester, and the issue would be released near the end of the same semester. Did I have time to give this the attention it deserved in between teaching and planning and that book chapter also due in May and that book I should be writing and all those meetings and emails? And yet. While I love my job teaching film and creative writing to STEM students, I’ve also been mostly without a writing community for the first time in years. I couldn’t resist this opportunity to feel like a part of a community again, and I’m so glad now that I agreed. Kapua has been wonderful to work with while keeping me on track to meet my deadlines, which I desperately needed! The rest of the staff and volunteers have been generous and thoughtful readers. Leading a workshop for Yellow Arrow called “Writing the Archive” also helped me feel connected again to some fantastic people and writers. I’m thankful for these opportunities and how they helped me grow in new ways.
I’m proud of what UpSpring has become, and I hope we’ve created something that the contributors will be proud of as well. Although editors certainly act as gatekeepers, there’s a way in which an issue of a literary journal grows beyond the choices we make, or maybe it’s better to say each new choice is informed by all the other choices that we’ve made in reading, and those that the contributors have made in writing and submitting. It reminds of these lines from Liane St. Laurent’s poem, “in which I die, become a bird-tree,” in which she writes, “I know a word the way a word knows / water, the way water finds its shape, / becomes what it wants.” At the end of the process of putting together a journal, when it works, it feels like water finding its shape, like the issue has become what it wanted to be.
The pieces in UpSpring vary widely in their interpretations of the theme, and it’s what I love most about them. No two contributors envision those moments of change and bloom in exactly the same way. They consider how we support each other through those moments or the ways that we survive them or celebrate them alone, as in Vanesha Pravin’s, “Olive Oil, Sumac & Harissa,” “Oh, Honey, / happily, you can survive: / Saturday night alone / again with the coyotes / yipping, the damn stove / knob still broken.” They offer insight on motherhood or all the upsprings that happen to girls in their formative years. They mediate on upsprings in metaphors of plants and dirt and roadkill and space. The word upspring implies joy, I think, new life, beginnings, and this issue is rightly filled with those. However, it’'s also true that upsprings emerge out of grief, illness, or trauma. And so we celebrate and commiserate, we encourage and support, we welcome these upsprings in all of their forms.
What I keep coming back to, in the end, are these last lines from Jillian Stacia’s poem, “Pruning”: “Just watch / the wild ways you’ll grow.” I think about those lines often, the way any great words stay with you—the way they settle themselves into your knowing. That’s also what it feels like to put together an issue of a literary journal, sort of. You can’t know exactly what it’s going to grow into, but after the process of reading hundreds of amazing submissions and narrowing and fitting and losing and gaining pieces, in the end, all you can say with awe is, “Wow, look at the wild ways you grew.”
Paperback and PDF versions are available from the Yellow Arrow bookstore. Discounts are also available (here) if you would like to purchase copies for friends and family (minimum purchase of five). You can also search for Yellow Arrow Journal on any e-book device or anywhere you purchase books, including Amazon and most other distribution channels. And don’t forget to join us for the reading of “Moments in Time: An UpSpring Reading” on June 28 at 7:00 pm EST. More information is forthcoming, but you can let us know that you plan on supporting contributors here.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to UpSpring, and to the many wonderful submitters whose pieces we couldn’t fit into this issue. It was a pleasure working with all of you, even if in very small ways. I hope you find words in this issue that settle into you like Jillian Stacia’s have for me. I hope you find within it many more wild ways to grow.
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