SHARK REEF

“Who decides what is good writing?” I asked my Composition students at Edmonds Community College this past fall.

We traded ideas. In the end, the answer was:

Us. We decide what is good.

That’s exactly right.

This is the story of how SHARK REEF came to be and of the remarkable woman, writer and friend, who modeled what it is to be a writer.
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“Writers grow on the trees on Lopez,” Alie Smaalders announced to me in our early days together in the late 1990s. It did seem true. Memory is hazy at best but in my mind’s eye, I still see fellow writer Laurie Parker and me stopping on the wooden library steps

What better moment in our profoundly messed up time to quote Richard III? Shakespeare can really write about dysfunctional regimes. I find myself thinking about the plays that focus on the rot at the top: Richard the III of course, but also Hamlet, King Lear, and even Measure for Measure, where a predatory puritanical ruler tries to blackmail a beautiful novice into having sex with him. A lot of Shakespeare sounds familiar to me right now.

As with all literary magazines, before we even went “live” with this issue, we’d begun planning for the next… and the next. We’re exploring some changes for SHARK REEF, and we’ll tell you about them when we have more details. For now, we know we’re saying farewell to co-editor for prose, Jeremiah O’Hagan. He’s brought his discerning eye,

The older I get, the more surely I understand that stories are all we have. That often the littlest stories are the ones that catch our heads and hearts.

When my son was born, I imagined it would be the big moments I’d cherish — the rolling over, crawling, walking, talking. And I do recall those things, but not as clearly as I remember tiny moments. I’ve realized, see, that he doesn’t need me to