EDITOR’S LETTER

It’s a brand new year, MockingHeart friends! 2024 seems to bring with it a certain optimism, a sentiment echoed by almost everyone I’ve mentioned the idea to–neighbors, friends, my students. A helpful part of this new, more-positive vibe is how it encourages being around those you care for. Seeking out camaraderie will doubtless be important this year, and we’re already off to a good start, as it’s our Winter 2024 issue’s theme.

This notion of placing trust in those you spend a lot of time around is all the more important now that the COVID-19 pandemic is ostensibly well in the rearview mirror and we can be out and about with others again. And still, no matter the situation around us, camaraderie can take on different forms, as we see in this issue’s important work. Featured poet John Warner Smith emphasizes embracing the uncertain and the new as perhaps the most important trust and companionship of all, writing, “I wrote my first poem, / not thinking it was a poem.” Artist Kevin Rabas explores how music can help companionship flourish in the photograph Ramiro & Irene. In “The Houses in the Holler,” poet (and MHR Associate Editor, back soon from hiatus) Denise Rogers shows how that self-love is sometimes the only camaraderie to be found, as she writes, “The man / you loved did not love you, and those / who did are dead and gone behind the church.” Artist Thomas Riesner suggests a darker camaraderie in the ink-on-paper piece Evil 2. In “Galveston Island at Dusk,” poet Boston Davis Bostian shows how the thread between two people is often trust enough: “Jack running in / and out of the surf, and me with my feet / on the lit sand.” And we all might answer to a higher purpose in which camaraderie plays a part, speculates Cordelia Hanemann in “Cat Poem”: “‘Mine,’ says your cat, putting out his paw / possessively.” Ultimately we too are social animals in our own right, and the pieces herein interrogate this truth with zeal.

As ever, I hope you relish the work in this issue, and I hope the creatives herein help you feel your own sense of camaraderie. Thanks for reading, for submitting, and for being a part of the MockingHeart community. Things wouldn’t be the same without you. And thanks, dear friends, for your excellent work in the world.

Tyler Robert Sheldon, Editor-in-Chief