The Missouri Review (To the Edge) Volume XIX Number 1 1996 - Softcover

In this issue's prose, the stakes are high. Characters come to crossroads almost as dramatic as in the legend of Robert Johnson and the devil. In Deborah Way's Editors' Prize-winning story "You Think I Care," a teenage girl, who thinks she is invulnerable, runs smack against the fact that she isn't. The story depicts the phenomenal mental agility with which the teenager tries to hold onto her self-image no matter what. In Lloyd Zimpel's amazing historically set story "Beiderman and the Hard Words," the fates mistake the patriarch of a pioneering family for Indiana Jones and keep imposing challenges, almost comical in their extremity, on him and his family, testing them beyond all reasonable limits. Lauren Slater's personal essay "Black Swans" describes equally bizarre calamities of a psychological sort as Slater relates her own experience with an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Adults in love can be almost as helpless and vulnerable as kids, as is the case for Nancy Kincaid's smitten middle-aged professor in "Why Richard Can't." Kincaid seems to wonderfully empathize with her male protagonist as he wrestles with the question of whether he should stick with the unfulfilling known or take a leap into the promising unknown. Paula Huston's "Serenissima" depicts a similarly powerful attraction, a woman's love for a place that represents freedom and romance to her but where she encounters something so unexpected and incongruous that it haunts her for life.

Jon Billman's story "When We Were Wolves" and Scott Boylston's "Captains By Default" concern boys' games and how they can get out of control. Both are about that thin line between playing by the rules and terrible destruction, how often we may skate up to the line, flirt with it, almost cross it--or indeed do so and change our lives forever.

Kathy Fagan's Editors' Prize-winning poems are very much crossroads poems that explore emotional thresholds and paths not taken. Our other poets--Liz Rosenberg, Kevin Stein and Julia Wendell--all write about the influences of family relationships--failed, sucessful or stricken--that dominate fate and personality, pushing the sense of self and security to the edge.

David Morrill's essay, "The One Strong Flower I Am," another Editors' Prize winner, acquaints us with the nebulous, confusing job of working with "at risk" children, many of whom come from worlds that are already over the line. They live surrounded by choices between bad and awful, but Morrill is intrigued less by their edginess and confusion than by their relative decency and their capability, even in the midst of chaos, for creativity.

William Maxwell's interview by Kay Bonetti is one of the most entertaining we've seen in some time. It tells of a long life of writing and editing. Maxwell is a short-story writer and novelist of the first order, who went to work at the New Yorker in 1936 at a salary of $35 a week, and over the next four decades became an important behind-the-scenes editorial influence on American fiction.

Hearty congratulations to this year's Editors' Prize winners, Deborah Way, Donald Morrill and Kathy Fagan. And special congratulations to last year's Editors' Prize fiction winner, Deborah Galyan, whose winning story, "The Incredible Appearing Man" has just been selected for the upcoming edition of BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES.