Our second online issue of Saranac Review, Issue 18, is a beauty. We received many wonderful submissions this semester, and our editorial assistants were thrilled at the range of ideas, styles, and genres in our queue. When we first read Lauren McGovern’s heart-wrenching essay, “Language Arts,” we knew we were witnessing something truly special at work: a writer carefully and sensitively weaving together her experiences with teaching, suicide, and grief to form a work of art pulsing with love and vulnerability. Our senior editorial assistant, Nina Serafini, was the first to read Jessica Harkins’s cycle of Psyche-inspired poems, and she came to our editorial meeting beaming with the certainty that we had received a jewel to place at the heart of our issue. And when we read Lynda Rushing’s haunting essay, “Autopsy 101,” about fearing and embracing the fragility of the human body, we saw a thread emerging, connecting our very distinct literary voices together. Each of the poems, essays, and stories in Issue 18 hums with human and earthly vulnerability, as well as the joys and sorrows of being alive.

This vulnerability and aliveness come through, too, in the gorgeous painting featured on our cover, “Sunday at the Small Town Pier,” by Canary Islands artist Nuria Meseguer. (To learn more about how the Plattsburgh State Art Museum acquired Meseguer’s work, check out this blog post by Senior Editorial Assistant Kora Austin!) Meseguer’s art explores the balance between strength and fragility we’re hoping to achieve in this issue. From the depths of the ocean, we see a collection of people bobbing at the surface, their faces hidden, their tender humanness exposed to both to us and to the depths of the unknown.

Thanks to Tonya Cribb, Plattsburgh State Art Museum Director, for allowing us to use Meseguer’s painting for our cover. I hear it takes a village not just to raise a child but to make a literary magazine. Our student editors read all submissions, our guest readers add their sparkling insights, and our Prose Editor, Gbolahan Adeola and Managing Editor, Aimée Baker, make essential decisions that help shape our final issue. I’m sad to say goodbye to two amazing returning staff members, Nina and Kora, who are graduating and off to the world beyond SUNY Plattsburgh; they’ve made Saranac Review better, and I’m truly mystified how we’ll go on without them! I’m also incredibly grateful to Sean Dermody, Assistant VP of Regional Procurement Services for expert advice, and to Jamie Winters, Assistant to the Dean of the Colleges of Arts, for consistent guidance. Without Lauren Waldron, English Department Administrative Assistant, I would be an absolute wreck, and so would this issue; thanks to her meticulous organization and insights, our contributors will get paid and our publication has a strong foundation to work from in the future.

As much as I had hoped we would be able to publish another full issue in December of 2023, that won’t be possible. Our next full issue, Issue 19, won’t be out until May 2024. As anyone in academia knows, and as Betty Cotter’s beautiful and biting story “The House by the Bog” reminds us, higher education doesn’t have a great track record for supporting the people who provide that education. In the past two years, my department of English has lost two creative writing colleagues to retirement, and we’re losing the remarkable Aimée Baker (formerly executive editor of Saranac Review) this year, due to a lack of material support for talented contingent faculty members like her. (And because she’s moving on to her own projects—books, podcasting, and films among them, lucky us!) None of these English positions and people are being replaced, for reasons that will sound familiar. (See The New Yorker’s recent article about the many little deaths of English departments across the country.) Which leaves me as the sole creative writing faculty member in our department. Which means I’ll be taking on teaching duties in the fall that would normally be shared with others.

While our next full issue will have to wait, Prose Editor Gbolahan Adeola and I are working on ideas for smaller-scale publications later in 2023. Even in these days of dwindling opportunities, we want to keep the possibilities of visual and literary art alive. So please stay tuned, stay in touch, and read and share the remarkable work in Issue 18.

~ Sara Schaff, Executive Editor