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I would like to thank John Amen for giving me the opportunity to edit the fiction for The Pedestal Magazine. I'm truly excited to take on this role for what I think is one of the best web-based literary magazines out there.
In reading the submissions over the past two months, I was startled at the number of quality stories, and unfortunately I had to reject a slew of good ones. Though this was the most painful aspect of the process for me, it was also encouraging in an odd way.
Many readers these days bemoan the quality of contemporary writing-- "it was better in the good old days." I'd like to offer four stories as evidence that the short story form is not only alive and well, but thriving, pulsing with verve, and also possibly dangerous to your health. The stories we have published in this issue ("Snow on Lambs," "A Desert Has No Exits," "Wise Woman," and "Lost Girls") have a noticeable commonality: by accident, all four stories are about women protagonists facing real-life complications.
In the case of John Vanderslice's rich and evocative story "A Desert Has No Exits"-- which draws parallels to Gilman's famous "The Yellow Wallpaper" (sans husband), as well as stories in the magical realist tradition--I found myself fascinated by the protagonist's obsession with the desert and her spiraling descent into a world increasingly of her own design.
The three shorter stories ("flash fiction," if you will) rely on introspection and reflection, to one degree or another, as the respective narrators attempt to piece together "the Truth" with a capital T. If art is, as Picasso pointed out, "the lie that tells the truth," what better way to thread the needle between reality and the meaning of that reality than to tell a story, spin a yarn? An understandable urgency strikes these narrators. Seemingly the characters in these shorter stories must testify, must proclaim their own experience. I can't blame them. In the end, what else is there?
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