winter 2009 at Pisgah Review

I was once told that Dylan Thomas said if a person can survive childhood and youth, that same person would have all the material needed to fill a lifetime of writing. Much of Thomas’s most famous work centers around childhood, invokes young narrators, and shows characters affected by youth.
And so it is with this issue of Pisgah Review, our fifth, which seeks to honor, examine, and explore—through short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry—the theme of youth. In these pages, many of the narrators are young in years, but are streetwise, book wise, or simply wiseacres. There are characters hanging on to youth as they fight the infirmities of growing old in a mad, mad world. Many of the voices herein face the time-honored questions asked by the young: what is love? what is death? why are we here?
Thanks go out to our newest editors, Ken Chamlee (poetry) and Jennifer McGaha (creative nonfiction), and our editorial board. Thanks to our editorial assistant, Stephen Schoenwolf, and copy editor Sara Claytor. My words fall short of showing Lonnie Busch my deep gratitude and respect. His design, layout, and cover art make Pisgah shine, plus his attention to detail in editing is born from the highest standard. Thanks as well to Brevard College—a community, a family, a home.
So we begin with the well-known quote from Thomas that plumbs the depth of the passions of the young:

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.