editor’s love note for the new issue of PRJ

LOVE NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
for the Worksongs for the Apocalypse issue, to be released on Friday, May 12

When curators and editors assemble work collected and created around a single theme, a single idea, they realize that the assemblage transforms each piece. It’s not that each work is better or worse by relation but, instead, that the collection of artifacts assembled around a single idea magnifies both the artifacts and the idea. This issue of Pea River Journal is one of those assemblages, a magnification of the idea both of the apocalypse and the necessity of creating a way of singing ourselves through it.
When the idea first came to me to pursue this theme, almost two years ago now, it was a sort of dark joke. Worksongs for the Apocalypse: ha ha. But now the joke has come home to roost, and each collected poem, story, image, song, resonates with foreboding fury. The work is a comfort, an incantation, a spell to keep out whatever looms at the back door and basement windows, a guidebook, a way to stay safe, an expression of what we thought the apocalypse might be or mean before that moment at which it changed and we changed with it.
So here is your horseshoe over the door. Make sure you turn it the right way. We’ll keep the porch light on for you regardless.

Trish Harris
May 2017
somewhere in south Alabama