EDITOR’S LETTER

Happy Fall, MHR friends, and welcome the new issue of MockingHeart Review.

What an interesting and devastating year this has been. It’s autumn now, and crisp air permeates our mornings as we crunch leaves underfoot and dive headlong into all things pumpkin. But during and before this new season, politics, social injustice including systemic racism, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have worn at the resolve of our country. The latter two have left many, many Americans dead. The pandemic has highlighted just how severely institutionalized inequalities harm disadvantaged individuals and communities, and globally, the coronavirus has now robbed over one million people of their lives. Likely no literary magazine could fully address these concerns, but this new issue of MockingHeart seeks nonetheless to highlight inequality and to promote its inverse, equality, which is our Fall 2020 theme.

The contributors in this Fall issue address Equality (and inequality) in different but always urgent ways, calling attention to both the hardships and the moments of peace that unite us. Poet Heather M.F. Lyke discusses sexism and gender roles in “To the Guy at the Drive-through Coffee Shop Who Thought Me Sexy for Driving a Stick,” and John Laue contemplates where we are nationally in his poem “Observations on America.” In Randy Zellers Improvising, artist Roy Beckemeyer observes that even in such difficult times as these, we might still find our creative sides ready to help us along. As Margo Davis writes in her poem “If Only,” though it’s hard to do, now seems to be the moment to keep our heads up “for one bird of encouragement.”

As the year begins to wane, please do all you can to stay safe, healthy, and fulfilled–and know that at MockingHeart Review, we admire your ability to make life work when the odds seem so set against it. Keep on reading and creating, and thank you, friends, as ever, for your excellent work in the world.

Tyler Robert Sheldon, Editor-in-Chief