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A Goodbye Letter from the Managing Editor

Abbie Skinner

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A little over two years ago, at the end of my first year of McNeese’s MFA program, everything was changing. The third year students I’d come to rely on for guidance and encouragement were graduating; Allie Mariano, the interim Fiction Director and an incredible teacher and mentor, was leaving for new opportunities; and I was moving apartments. Come the fall semester, only a few short months away, there would be a new cohort of first years in Workshop with new stories to tell and I would start teaching freshman Composition for the first time. With all these changes and new beginnings, when it came time to volunteer for our roles with McNeese’s print publication, The McNeese Review, I thought I would be happy to step into the role of Fiction Reader #3 once more and gather a bit more experience.  

It wasn’t meant to be. Instead, I was offered the position of Fiction Editor, not for The McNeese Review, but for Boudin, the online publication with only two previous editions. 

A year prior, after my first morning at McNeese, full of orientation meetings and new faces, I got lunch with my mom at Tad’s (if you know, you know). She’d driven down with me for the move from New York to Louisiana and the next day I would drive her to the airport and then I would be all on my own. But, that afternoon, we were embarrassing ourselves by asking the waitress for the correct pronunciation of “boudin”. For the uninitiated, boudin – the food – is a pork sausage with rice, onions, peppers and spices. A Louisiana staple. Our waitress patiently corrected our pronunciation and recommended we get the boudin from Homsi’s Deli at 2124 Broad St. or Market Basket at 4950 Lake St. I still have the piece of paper where she wrote down the addresses and exactly what to order. Like its namesake, Boudin the publication has grown to be quite the mixture with just the right amount of spice. 

Boudin has grown from two editions to thirteen in just two years and there are a lot of people deserving of thanks and recognition for that growth. Mayank Manchada took on the role of Poetry Editor at the same time I became Fiction Editor and published two All-Poetry editions. Michael Horner, McNeese’s Fiction Director, put together the Summer ’23 All Fiction edition and gave me a lot of guidance with each edition I worked on. Rachel Pittman read and helped me select the poetry pieces for the first Boo-din edition (and taught me a lot about reading poetry along the way). Victoria de Benedicty contributed beautiful works of art to three editions, including the recent One Sentence Stories. 

Summer came round again and so did more changes. Dr. Lynn Watson stepped in as Boudin‘s new Editor-in-Chief at the beginning of the Fall ’23 semester. Her vision has guided Boudin for the past year and it is a dazzling one. She graduated me from Fiction Editor to Managing Editor and gathered even more help from Aiman Tariq, Karris McCollum, and Taryn White. Each of them have led the publication of another edition, adding their own spices to the mix. Lynn, Aiman, Karris, Taryn, and the editorial assistants, Mia Bonds and Alexandria Knight, have poured countless hours of work into the powerhouse that Boudin stands as today and I can’t offer enough gratitude. 

Now I’ve graduated and everything has changed once more but Boudin has never been stronger. My last hope is that the addition of the alumni spotlight section will serve to make Boudin a touchstone for program alumni to continue to connect with the MFA program. And I hope you know, if you’re reading this (and especially if you’ve read this far), you have a front row seat to a great story that is just beginning. I can’t wait to find out what happens next. 

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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.