EDITOR’S NOTE

A year ago, our community lost one of its brightest stars, when Professor Pauline Uchmanowicz passed away. She had long been a champion of our program’s students and their work, and this, our 15th annual issue of Stonesthrow Review, is dedicated to her.

For many months our main offices were filled with boxes containing Pauline’s old books, and though everyone had been invited to comb through these for some memento of her, I found myself unable to take anything. Each time I’d see a book by Tobias Woolf, or a volume of poems by Martin Espada that I knew I’d love to read, I would seize up and need to go. I did not want her books haunting my shelves. I did not want her to be gone. Nothing seemed like the right thing to remember her by.

Then one day I found a copy of a poem sitting out on the table near the copier. It had belonged to Pauline, of course, and it happened to be one I knew well: “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. a fighter pilot from the Second World War. He’d written it to share the joys of flying, an experience then rarely known to most civilians.

The same day I found the poem, I had been writing about an early childhood memory of watching the President address the nation on television in 1986, after the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. His speech concluded with the line, “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’” It borrowed two phrases from Magee’s poem, one from the first line and one from the last.

I took the poem home and pinned it near my desk, where I can see it as I write. It reminds me of Pauline, and of the feeling of flight that poetry gives to all of us, and all that it allows us to touch, far from earth, and all its surly bonds.

In an interview, Pauline once expressed her love of working with students and of editing this “expansive” literary magazine each year. “The fresh and surprising output of young writers is always delightful to me,” she said. Her teaching “endeavors,” as she called them, “encouraged” her own daily writing.

It is in that spirit that we hope that the fresh and surprising work in these pages will delight you as well, and encourage your own best endeavors.

—The Editors

Bios for 2020 Contributors can now be found here.