Letter from the Guest Editor

Taylor Mahone

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Somehow, it’s summer again. Last summer, I thought about moments and their endings all the time. Where coasts dip off to, the tip top of the peaked heights of the dunes, the precise moment when the slow, melty burn of the sunset gives way to night. I thought about the endings I could see right before me, like the other side of bridges over the gulf and the bay, afternoons, semesters.

For this issue, we asked for stories that span across a single sentence. No more. All moments and endings in a single sentence. Thinking in one-sentence stories creates stories in everything. Reading over the pieces, I thought of the one-sentence story as a painting, and perhaps more so than any other fiction medium. The minutia matters. Everything is right there, and brevity sends the story into motion. Like a photograph, or more illusory, like a dream or a passing scene smeared through a car window. These pieces are rich with detail and parallels and cross great distances. Some of the pieces inside are winding, going round and round like a whirlpool, like Grant Faulkner’s “Plotting,” that engulfs the reader, dizzyingly, to the center. “The Wasteland” by Prosper Ìféányí is powerful and taut, and I imagine plucking the piece like a string. The imagery conjured in Lynn Mundell’s “Trampoline” is musical and rich in its thematic connections.

Though the subject and length of the pieces varies throughout the issue, I found a breathless quality in each, and distinct voices. There’s yearning in many and looking to the past. Desire is there too, and voyeurism, and nods to the mythic. Each story-in-a-sentence in this issue is rich with word play and revamps the idea of plot as something that must develop over tens, or even hundreds of pages. Rather, plot can grow in the reader’s mind, taking shape, making connections after, as the story-in-a-sentence rings on a loop even after initial reading.

Thank you very much to all who submitted their minute masterpieces for this edition. I thought of them as rooms, with details strewn carefully and plots that linger afterward like shadows on a wall. Thank you to Lynn Watson, always, for giving me the chance to be the editor for this edition as my last project during my time at McNeese. What a strange sentence that is. Thank you to Victoria de Benedicty for your art and all the stories within your world(s). Thank you to Abbie Skinner and Mia Bonds and Alex Knightly.

Cheers to summer, and summer all-year round in our dreams,

Taylor

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To learn more about submitting your work to Boudin or applying to McNeese State University’s Creative Writing MFA program, please visit Submissions for details.