New Online Mag Celebrates the Muddy Messiness of Life
We at Mud Season Review seek to celebrate the full process of artistic creation, from inspiration to publication-welcoming into our open and collaborative community wide-ranging voices that tramp and track in the mud of human experience.
Well, after reading that mission, you don’t have to be a genius to agree that naming a journal Mud Season Review is pretty awesome. The “mud of human experience” – I love that phrase. The idea that life is messy, diverse, that we are all as human beings just trying to exist and track through the nitty gritty occurrences. It speaks to the “emotional truth” that lays behind all of the pieces included in this journal, and the diverse ways in which the Mud Season Review attempts to capture them.
The idea for Mud Season Review came about in 2014, when the Burlington Writers Workshop (a free writing workshop for all Vermonters) surveyed their members and received a high response that the group should publish a journal. In imitation of their workshops, the pieces chosen for their first journal, published April 2015, reflect a diversity of craft in both the writing and visual art fields. Additionally, as is the supportive nature of the Burlington Writers Workshop to promote and support work that is published, Mud Season Review provides feature interviews in which the artist is able to not only share their work, but also their views on how their art came to be. For novice writers, these featured interviews can then become a tool to build upon one’s own writing processes.
For beginning writers, this journal is a good place to submit as their website states the journal “aim[s] to publish strong, skillful writing from far and wide, and hope[s] always to include voices new to us and new to publication.” In fact, their website which publishes monthly - one story, one poem or collection of poems, one essay or piece of narrative nonfiction, and a visual art piece – promotes their contributors for a full month by featuring interviews with them, inviting them to read their work, and offering them a virtual place within their workshop community.
After checking out their first printed journal, I must say I’m impressed with their first attempt. And shockingly, what I found the most fascinating (and appealing) about the contributions were the visual works. Kudos to Jessica Nissen, Paige Berg Rizvi, Nicole Heymer, Katie Short, and Nance Van Winckel for capturing my imagination in such a way that I sat there for minutes studying each image, trying to decipher the content of each photo, when studying visual art has never been my forte.
Speaking of fortes, I consider myself a fiction writer, but what I felt most connected to and drawn to in this journal were the poems. For someone who doesn’t understand poetry, and is always in awe of sitting in workshops with the poets who are part of her MFA program at Lesley University, the narrative form most of the authors used for these poems made the task of reading them less daunting, and, actually, fun. “Fun” being an odd word to describe the poetry as most of the themes here, not to mention in all of the contributions, felt grim and serious.
Don’t get me wrong, I love grim and serious. Yet, at some point, the fiction and nonfiction pieces were too dark for me, felt too long. By the time I got to Craig Reinbold’s “Here in the Museum of Things Gone Terribly Wrong,” it took me several days to just get through all the terrible acts of humanity – rape, assault, murder, that were mentioned (though I have to admit, I loved the ending of that fiction short story and have to share it here:
It strikes me that we tell others our stories, these stories, because if we don’t, because if we bury them in ourselves, then these stories, these parts of ourselves, will eventually disappear. And sometimes that is indeed what we want. Sometimes it’s not. And sometimes we’re not sure what we want, so we tell a friend maybe, just once, and then it’s up to them what they do with it.
In contrast to the fiction though, when the poems dealt with those same themes, the short length of the poem, made it much more digestible and I didn’t mind delving into the some of the sad truths of being human like lost love, death, change, abuse, and so forth.
Overall, I thought this was a fine first publication for the Burlington Writer’s Workshop, and if they would have me, I’d submit to them (I know I just said their short stories felt long and dreary, but I write long and dreary short stories sometimes too – guess that is just part of the muddy messiness of life). I applaud the journal for their inclusion of various written and visual art forms, and love their goal of being open to diverse voices – as is evident when you read the materials and learn about the contributors themselves in their bios at the back of the journal.
If you’re a novice writer looking for a journal that supports its contributors, I’d say definitely add Mud Season Review to your list.
