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Letter from the Guest Editor

Karris Rae

__________

Human minds like binaries. Maybe this is why we’ve come to see math and poetry on opposite sides of a spectrum: one end cold, practical, unfeeling, artless; the other warm, frivolous, passionate, human. I’ve bounced between these extremes for a long time now. I applied for a selective, arts-focused curriculum in high school, studying dance, theater, writing, music, and visual arts. Then I went to a STEM-focused university and earned a degree in economics. Now I find myself back in the arts, earning my MFA in Creative Writing. I make spreadsheets and play the oboe for fun.

I have to confess: I don’t see a difference between the two supposed extremes.

Smart humans everywhere seek the meaning behind existence, whether in the artful geometry of the atom or the calculated meter of a poem. There is something equally satisfying in the elegance of a mathematical proof and in the culmination of a story’s thematic threads. Equal beauty in the number and the letter. What I’m saying is that I think nerds everywhere have more in common than they might think, regardless of field.

I chose this theme for my last issue of Boudin because I think we all have a lot to learn from each other. The poems and flash fictions in this issue don’t just tangle with the beauty of math, but prove that it is one of many valid media for capturing the human experience.

On that note, I want to thank all of Boudin’s readers, contributers, and team members for a fantastic two years. When I started working on Boudin, it was a small online magazine with a sporadic publishing calendar and a one-woman team (I tip my hat to Abbie Skinner!). Since then, we’ve expanded to a team of nine, with regular, monthly issues of work any magazine would love to publish. I’m proud of the work we’ve done and I’m excited to see what Boudin does next in the hands of my very capable associate editor, Taryn White.

So to everyone: keep reading, keep writing, keep calculating, and keep searching for truth. We might never ever find it, but the meaning is in the search itself.

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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.