Author’s Note: “‘In the Distance’ speaks to the idea that we might travel in order to get distance from something, perhaps a past in need of healing, but that the story will follow close behind. The unnamed “unrelenting story” in the poem might pursue us full circle, even circumnavigate the globe. But on a hopeful note, the expansive nature of travel does allow one to experience the world differently and perhaps see things with new eyes, toward a different end.”... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “When a childhood friend told me about his devastating work injury, my mind flashed back to a time when we were sure we were immortal and invulnerable. I wrote this piece as a tribute to our friendship in those younger years, and out of a desire to understand what drove our acts of daring.” ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “The Wizard of Oz was probably one of the first movies I ever watched, and I loved the Wicked Witch. Often, villains are my favorite part of narratives, and she terrified me—her laugh, ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “This poem explores the ways we attempt to justify our privileges to ourselves. While I wrote it thinking primarily of my own white middle class American culture, it asks questions more ... [Continue Story]
Delmarva Public Radio produces the program Delmarva Today hosted by Delmarva Review's very own Fiction Editor, Hal Wilson.
This edition features Delmarva Review, Volume 14 with guests Wilson Wyatt, Jr., Executive Editor of the Review, poetry editors Anne Colwell and Katherine Gekker, nonfiction editor Ellen Brown, and fiction submitter Ronan Keenan. Each read a short selection from the Review.
Anne Colwell is a professor of English at the University of Delaware, Katherine Gekker's poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Ellen Brown is a nature and environmental writer, and Ronan Keenan’s fiction and nonfiction writings have appeared in a number of well-known magazines including The Atlantic.
Please note, the submission period for volume 15 is also open and submissions are being received in poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction.
Click below to begin the show...
Author’s note: “I once had a friend who did yoga and wrote down her dreams and earnestly informed me that she could hitchhike alone and be safe because she was special. She seemed to truly believe that nothing could hurt her. In “Her Gestures, Her Rules,” I imagined that she had a daughter who would, like most daughters, go from acolyte to critic to something in between.”
Her Gestures, Her Rules
BY THE EARLY ’80s, when the new age was still new, my mother, a local legend, operated the most popular yoga studio in Ulster County. Valley Yin Yang catered to aging hippies, rich and poor. I, conceived in 1969 at an ashram in Goa, was a significant line in her biography: an illegitimate half-Indian daughter. Her students were fascinated by me, as they were by every aspect of my mother’s life—her clothes, her diet, her true beliefs, her original religion. And, of course, her long legs and her thick hair, so dark my hair could have come from her, not from a never-named Indian father... [Continue Story]
George R. Merrill is the featured nonfiction writer in Volume 14 of Delmarva Review. He is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. Merrill is a writer, photographer, and former nonfiction editor of the Delmarva Review. He has authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. A native New Yorker, he provided counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and Baltimore before moving to Maryland’s Eastern Shore. His essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
Delmarva Review's Fiction Editor and host of the radio show Delmarva Today, Hal Wilson, probes the meaning and purpose of the popular nonfiction personal essay form with George Merrill in the following Delmarva Today radio podcast.
Click below to tune in. This is a fascinating and timely discussion.
Delmarva Review announced publication of its 14th annual literary journal presenting new poetry, short stories, and creative nonfiction from seventy authors in twenty-five states, the District of Columbia and four other countries.
“The fourteenth issue is our largest, with over four hundred pages of exceptional new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions during the year,” said Wilson Wyatt, executive editor.
The review also announced a writers’ submission period for the 15th anniversary issue, open now through March 31, 2022. It does not charge submission or reading fees. Writers’ guidelines are posted on the website: DelmarvaReview.org.
The cover of the 14th issue is “Tangier Island Light,” by contributing photographer Jay P. Fleming, of Annapolis, from his new book, Island Life.
As a literary collection, the focus is on outstanding new writing. Topics for this issue open with an essay about dealing with death over a lifetime. They continue with subjects about desire, loss, aging, bullying, equality, beliefs, the pandemic, and many others. “Ultimately, all of the themes revolve around change,” Wyatt said. “It’s through human change that we face the truths that guide us on our journeys or help us make sense of where we’ve been.”
The journal is divided into three major sections: poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Each is an impressive collection of literary work. The sections open with an editor’s interview of a featured author, giving more in-depth perspective of the writing that follows. The book ends with seven reviews of recent books, and biographies of the writers.
Delmarva Review was created to offer writers a valued home to publish their best writing at a time when many commercial publications were reducing literary content or closing their doors. The review makes room for new authors, as well, including a featured high school student.
While favoring the permanence of the printed word, the review also publishes electronic versions to meet the digital preferences of readers. Both paperback and electronic editions are immediately available at major online booksellers. It can also be purchased at regional specialty bookstores.
Since its origin in 2008, the Delmarva Review has published new poetry and prose by over 400 authors. They are from most of the United States and sixteen other countries. About forty percent are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region of the Mid-Atlantic. Seventy-eight have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Some have attained notable attention in “best of” anthologies or received public acclaim from other literary critics and editors.
In addition to Wyatt, the journal’s staff for this edition includes Bill Gourgey, the managing editor who designs and publishes the review, poetry editor Anne Colwell, poetry assistant editors Katherine Gekker and Wendy Elizabeth Ingersoll, fiction senior editor Harold O. Wilson, fiction coeditors James O’Sullivan and Lee Slater, creative nonfiction editor Ellen Brown, book section editor Gerald Sweeney, treasurer Judy Reveal, and copyeditor Jodie Littleton.
Published by the Delmarva Review Literary Fund Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the journal receives partial financial support from individual tax-deductible contributions and a public grant from Talbot Arts, with revenues from the Maryland State Arts Council. For more information, see the website DelmarvaReview.org.
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Author’s Note: “Welcome Day is about a parent’s angst of how a combination of flawed genetics and a murky past will impact her child. The central character, Maria, is a single parent trying to distance her young son from her history of involvement in Irish paramilitary activity. In the story Maria watches her son begin life in a new school and worries how the ‘nature versus nurture’ dynamic will impact his development.”
Welcome Day
YOU’D SWEAR THERE’S A PIPE BOMB INSIDE, the way Maria holds the envelope at arm’s length. “The strain of fear’s gotten into ya,” Jimmy would say if he could see her now, panicked about opening a letter. This is the same Maria who’d hardly break stride when planting loaded packages near the Belfast barracks, years ago. Back then, she could create thick barriers in her mind, making it easy to categorize the soldiers as a faceless enemy from across the water rather than young lads barely out of school, homesick and frightened in strange borderlands. These days, Maria’s barriers are low and permeable, allowing fear to seep through whenever it wants. Today, it has come through her letterbox.
Sure enough, this envelope contains what she dreaded…(story continued in Spy)
Author’s Note: “The poem began with a prompt—to show the beauty of something ugly. Having lived in the DMV all my life, and recently read a history of the Chesapeake Bay, I thought of the oyster. It is not attractive, but it is vital to the bay and, of course, delicious to eat. The poem imagines life from the oyster’s point of view.” ...[Continue Story]
