Good morning everyone. I hope the week has been good to you.

Around here, spring edged in enough to melt the last of February's blizzard, making it possible for a crew to access my backyard in Bobcats and boots to carve up and remove a large tree that came down in the storm. The tree — a hemlock, I think — lay diagonally across the yard for a few weeks, filling the view from all the windows at the back of the house and from any spot in the yard, and although for the sixteen years I've lived here it stood upright then spent a short time on the ground by comparison, its absence when I arrived home from work to find it gone was a shock. The yard, restored to how it had been before the tree fell — apart from the tree's own presence to one side, of course— had become empty and absent. There's a sideways stump left behind with a deep new hole beneath it where roots, unknown to me, rotted away and carried on rotting up the core of the trunk for a a long time unseen, and there are ruts in the muddy ground where the Bobcats drove back and forth, leaving a couple of spots where the exposed woody roots of our broad Norwegian maple at the center of the yard were scraped raw and bright by their passage. So there are traces, a physical memory of what is absent, but it's the way the yard that never looked empty looks empty now I'm left thinking about and, for whatever reason this morning, writing about because suddenly that emptiness looks important. As Elisa Gabbert (currently at work on a book about holes) writes in a new essay at Cluny Journal about her encounters with a neighborhood pit, "Edges are where meaning gathers," and absence — removal, maybe more so — makes edges where there weren't any or where we couldn't see them before. (And if I had a point here, perhaps you'll find that at the edges of something, too?)

But! We also made meaning in our pages this week, so here's what we've been up to:

Kit Maude returned with a review of Telegraphy by Farah Ali (CB Editions).

And our featured story was "Let the Children Play" by Peter C. Conrad, selected by guest editor DeMisty Bellinger.

Then in research notes Brian Kiteley wrote about his novel Jack & Emily, new from Astrophil Press. I'm thrilled to have Brian's writing on the site again – he was a Writer In Residence for us a long time ago (I'm still trying to figure out how to get some of those archives working to be available for reading again more easily), and I wrote about what his work means to me here.

Finally, at AWP I caught up with contributor Éireann Lorsung and heard about how, along with her students and colleagues, she is reimagining what a literary journal can be at South Dakota Review. Right now, you are invited to send them weather reports from wherever you are as part of that reimagining.

Thanks for reading,

Steve Himmer