A Note From the Editor:

For the first nine or ten years of my life, the only book we had in our household was the Bible. Both of my grandparents, who raised me, quit their educations in order to work and provide for their families, so neither had any real time to read for leisure. Once I became an “Independent Reader” in elementary school, I began to get an obsessive interest in books, and both of my grandparents decided that it was a good idea for me to start my own collection. Living in a small country town without a bookstore, I was reading a book a day and begged at least twice a month to be taken to the nearest Barnes & Noble, located an hour away, with a shopping list of five to six books.

It didn’t take long before reading wasn’t enough; I had a strong urge to create and write my own stories. In middle school and high school my imagination would produce full notebooks and journals of adventures, and it was the process of getting it all down on paper that became a therapeutic way for me to express my joys, anxieties, fears, depressions, and other feelings that I couldn’t articulate off-paper. I took my first creative writing class during my sophomore year in college, where I became immediately attracted to the idea of workshop. Reading the works of other individuals who wanted to share the worlds bursting from their imaginations excited me and made me feel as if I was apart of a group of inventors and artists whose goal was to share their expressions and interpretations of the world with everyone.

As the Editor of the general issue of The Rappahannock Review, I have found it exciting to give back to the literary community that has continuously given to me. Piecing together an issue including writers who have never sent work to a literary journal before and writers who are seasoned veterans, both nationally and internationally, gives me hope that someone else living in a town without a bookstore can enjoy what we’ve put together.

Tonto Duncan, Editor in Chief