Our sixty-fifth year of publishing, and our second year of Portland Review’s online-only format began with the usual questions — where would we be taking the Review this year? Or, more interestingly, where might our authors take us?
To answer these questions, we posed one of our own: Truth, or Dare?
We received the truth of a compartmentalized self in Ana Maria Caballero’s “Room”; of accepting an ever-shifting identity in Michael Mark’s “She Fools Me Every Time”. After the last few years of swallowing grief, Maya Dobjensky’s story, “Things We Fed to the Sinkhole” resonated with us, “We had run out of food by then, and our stomachs rumbled. The sinkhole groaned with us, another organ in the throng.”
We dared you to send us your most daring work, whether that be in form, content, or anything in-between, and you rose to the challenge. We were thrilled to publish our first (but hopefully not last!) comic, Coyote Shook’s “What Trees Mean to America”. We savored the magical realism of a barber with a unique gift in Joe Baum’s “Shearing”. We took heart in the words of Marina Budrys’s genre-bending essay of letters, “you wear bars over the beating, thumping muscle that aches for people to see you. i see you if you will let me.”
Inspired by the work we were reading, we decided to shake things up with a few new events. In fall, we held an online reading that featured past Portland Review contributors Katherine Rooks, Evan Joseph Massey, and Fatima Van Hattum, along with local author and Review contributor Jay Ponteri.
Instead of the typical break in publication in summer, we doubled down, bringing you The Dog Days of Poetry, a cool dip in the world of verse, during which we published two new poems each week.
I am bursting with gratitude for the wonderful 2021-2022 Editors and staff. Your passion, patience, perseverance, and your hard work made all of this possible.
Thank you also to our readers and contributors. I can’t wait to read more.
2021-2022 Masthead
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Kynna Lovin
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Kyndall Tiller
FICTION
August Amoroso
Dan Chilton
NONFICTION
Stephanie Paris
POETRY
Jessamyn Duckwall
Joshua Stanek
BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR
Claire Plaster
SOCIAL MEDIA & NEWSLETTER EDITOR
Ashley Lockard
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS
Karina Agbisit
Alexis Garrett
Alex Halbrook
Eric Larsh
Angela Northness
Samantha Rivas
READERS
August Aarnes
Alexander Chopra
Alex Roselio De La Cruz
Ciara Dreeszen
C.D. Habecker
Catherine Kane
Evan Kotsonis
James Grey Lindgren
Kiko Mendez
April Nash
Carmen Peters
Diane Tehrani
Matthew White
Devon Williams
Justin Woomer
Faculty Advisor: Janice Lee
Instructor: Michael J. Seidlinger