Welcome to Meniscus volume 11, issue 2. We weren’t sure, eleven years ago, if we’d be able to get a new literary journal up and running, and thanks to our contributors and readers, it has after all been possible. Thank you for making our work (a) possible and (b) so rewarding.

 

For this issue, there was a very large submissions pile, both poetry and prose. This means that far too much quality work was, necessarily, rejected. The principles for selecting about 60 poems and about 18 prose works out of over 1000 submissions required us to make very difficult decisions. The aim was to produce an issue with a balance of style, voice, and content, and ensuring we include some new writers alongside well-established voices.

 

This is just to say that your disappointment, if your work was declined, is mirrored by our disappointment in not being able to include all the genuinely terrific work submitted. It is also to remind those not selected that the issue is that your work was ‘not good enough’, but that the laws of physics restricted how much excellent writing we could fit into this limited space. Please keep writing; please keep submitting your work to Meniscus and to competitions and to other literary journals.

 

Far fewer works submitted to this issue than to some of the recent issues focused on the wicked problems besetting the world: climate change, the death throes of capitalism, military activities. More seem to be about individual moments, quotidian pleasures or sorrows: instances of the personal inhabiting the place of the political. Quite a proportion of the works submitted were about writing itself – including the labour of submitting work for publication, and receiving rejections; effectively, reflections on the life of making creative work, and the intersection of craft plus imagination plus physical and emotional labour.

 

There were no prompts given to contributors, of course; moreover, the contributors hail from every continent, and from the very young (one author is 11) and those who identify as definitely aged. This suggests that perhaps there is validity to the notion of the zeitgeist: a trend of thought, interest or concern that seems to be characteristic of a moment in history. If the attention to the personal and local shown in contributions to this issue is an effect of the zeitgeist, we can only celebrate the growing focus on future-mindedness, and on communal compassion.

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We're delighted to include the winners of the AAWP / Ubud Writers and Readers Festival prize for translation over the past 4 years, with the judge's comments, the translated work, and the translators' statements all included as a lovely record of this mode of creative practice. 

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