Earlier this month, I visited Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West again. I remembered my first visit, when I arrived thinking about Hemingway. This time, although I wanted to spend some time indoors, I really wanted to visit the cats.
The descendants of Hemingway’s famous six-toed cats wander the grounds freely. They sleep beneath tropical foliage and drape themselves across benches, and on the morning of my visit, one was stretched out, belly up, entirely at ease in the warmth of the sun. The house has become a monument to a writer’s life, but the cats seem unconcerned with reputation, legacy, or interpretation. They belong to a different story altogether.
As I worked through the pieces gathered in this summer issue, I found myself returning to that image. Again and again, our contributors remind us that human beings are not the sole authors of meaning. We live among other lives, other histories, and other ways of experiencing the world. Sometimes, we notice them. Often, we don’t.
In the opening of our summer issue, Keri Withington’s poems find deer grazing among fallen pears and a neighborhood gathered beneath drifting ash. Laura Hannett discovers wonder in dandelions, creeping groundcover, and the intricate mechanics of fungal reproduction. Maria Koors’s “Case Study in Synesthesia” explores forms of perception that resist easy explanation, while Sharyn Wolf’s essay begins with a disagreement with Walker Percy and grows into a thoughtful meditation on animal consciousness and the limits of human-centered thinking, one that resonates with ideas in recent work by writers such as Michael Pollan and Peter Godfrey-Smith about the nature of consciousness and experience. Throughout the issue, birds, insects, rivers, flowers, trees, weather, and wild places appear not as scenery but as fellow participants in the world we share.
What unites these pieces is less a subject than a way of looking. Whether writing about travel, gardens, rivers, birds, memory, faith, grief, or home, the contributors gathered here practice a kind of sustained attention—to places, to other lives, and to the often-overlooked details that shape our understanding of the world. The photographs and artwork of Becky Boling, John DeAngelo, and Josiane Kouagheu reinforce that invitation, asking us to slow down and look again.
Issue Forty-One includes poetry and prose by Becky Boling, Clementine Mendelson, D. E. Green, Elizabeth Shanaz, George Franklin, Joseph Mills, Keri Withington, Laura Hannett, Maria Koors, Rebecca G. Biber, Robert McNamara, Ruth Holzer, Ryan Di Francesco, Sharyn Wolf, and Val Margolius, along with images by Becky Boling, John DeAngelo, and Josiane Kouagheu. The cover image is by John DeAngelo.
Digital and print versions of our summer issue are available through MagCloud. Digital versions of the issue are free, and perfect-bound print copies of the issue cost twelve dollars. You can read the issue online and order print copies at this link.
WILLOWS WEPT REVIEW 