The Editorial Team

Spy Reprints “Pulling Salt from Water” by Kristina Morgan

October 1, 2022 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: Pulling Salt from Water was not an easy thing to write. I have never written about sexual abuse. I think this subject braids nicely with my youth and experience of schizophrenia. It’s a story that triumphs over tragedy. It’s a story that highlights my writing life and my need to be transparent. Yes, I have trauma in my past and yes, I have schizophrenia. Those two things no longer define me. I am at peace.

Editor’s Note: “Pulling Salt from Water” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in nonfiction, as published in the Delmarva Review, Volume 14 (2021). From the opening lines, we are invited into the mind of a courageous writer who is “best understood on the page.” She gives her voice to metaphors that “long to be set free, the paragraph that belongs to me, the one I decide to share as I try to touch my reader.”

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Spy Reprints “The Elements of Drawing” by Benjamin Harnett

October 1, 2022 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: The Elements of Drawing is a famous instructional text by the 19th c. English art critic and philosopher John Ruskin. It’s a book I recently picked up when I considered trying my hand at drawing, again. Ruskin made a political project out of training the eye and hand to represent the truth of the world, and it inspired my attempt to apply his lessons to the troubles of our present age....[Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “Garden” by Michael Gazda

September 30, 2022 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: “Garden” began with the woeful state of my yard which I knew needed tending. The thought occurred to me that while my yard was in a poor state to my mind, it was becoming a paradise to the various residents who inhabited it. I tried to capture a heightened description of an idealized garden that had been left untended. I wanted to contemplate that both value judgments and drama are a matter of perspective. ...[Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “At the Community Gardens” by John Palen

September 30, 2022 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: I turned eighty recently, in a world that seems increasingly crazy and disjointed. For me now, making some sense of that world is less a matter of big ideas than of small actions. Like carpenters who nail together a home for the senile, or the homeless man for whom bus routes map the...[Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “Coffee from Arabia” by Abby Provenzano

September 30, 2022 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: My experience in the ballet world, and the close friendships and sisterhood cultivated among us dancers, provided inspiration for this story: “Coffee From Arabia” follows a young up-and-coming ballerina as she navigates growing up, identity, and desire both on and off the stage. In writing, it has been enchanting to peek behind the curtain at this life again! [Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “Already Broken” by Irene Hoge Smith

September 29, 2022 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: My family lived on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, when I was born, and remained there for two years before beginning a series of moves that would take us to Maryland, California, Michigan, and New York. Between Michigan and New York before our mother left us with our father. My memories before that rupture became hard to hang on to, and impossible to corroborate... [Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “First Light” by Diane Thiel

September 29, 2022 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: “First Light” is based on a true story from my own history and my mother’s history. There are moments in our lives when we have glimpses into our parents’ formative experiences and what they might have struggled through as children. The speaker in the poem spends her own night thinking about her mother “as that little girl,” and there is a sense she can relate to her mother’s childhood loss, her worry. The poem opens with dawn and closes with a new sense of dawn, one that strengthens the connection between mother and daughter and touches on a faith that things can “be made right again.”... [Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “An Expression of Grief” by Abigail Johnson

September 29, 2022 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: “An Experience of Grief” is an effort to put down into words the wordless horror that is grief. The concept and the structure of the poem are inspired by a grounding technique that is popular as a coping mechanism for various mental health issues. This technique aims to ground one in space and time by using the senses to observe and reconnect to the physical world. By interrogating the feeling of grief in this manner and attaching physical sensations to it, it is my hope that the inexpressible has become slightly more expressible... [Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “Walt Whitman at the Playground” by Adam Tamashasky

September 28, 2022 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: I’ve long loved Walt Whitman’s work for many reasons, and this piece—“Walt Whitman at the Playground”—echoes one of them: his enthusiastic joy at everyday moments, a joy that often strikes me as augmented by an ever-present thought for mortality. I wrote the poem at the playground in question, watching my daughters at play and the people around me, grateful that we were all alive together at this one moment... [Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “Magnetic Doorstop” by Catherine Carter

September 28, 2022 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: The unseen forces that surround us and shape our lives are so fascinating—and I mean the literal ones, like magnetism or gravity, not just the metaphysical ones, though I also have doubts about how different those really are. If the spiritual and metaphysical are anywhere, then they’re here, they’re now, they’re ordinary and constant. They’re in humankind and they’re also in the magnetic doorstop... [Continue Story]

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