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Editor's Notes

 

Jottings, Brush Strokes, and the Photographic Eye     

    

    No one really understands why a person begins writing, painting, or photographing if not under compulsion, certainly not the artist.  But craft we do:  on small scraps of paper, spare envelopes, or almost anything that doesn’t move, intended  initially for no one’s eyes but the writer’s own. That’s how we begin.  In time, efforts find their ways into minimalistic outlines or perhaps work plans mixed with fragments of ideas.  They could be developing ideas placed in a journal becoming eventually poems, short stories, paintings, or refined photographs.  Sometimes they remain just jottings, flotsam, tucked away in some large drawer perhaps to spark creativity for a later project.

 

     The journal is a curious piece of writing rarely shared.  Creative persons know the journal well and use it diligently.  It’s slightly more formal, depending on the creator, than the personal diary but almost always filled with definitive information, thought by some to be only meanderings, at other times life blood.  Often journals are insights into one’s thoughts and fears, belief systems, aspirations, triggers for even more formal writing or painting.  Some journals are like accidental discoveries, jotted down hurriedly.  In its origins sometime in the mid-1200’s, the journal was a book containing forms of worship for the day hours. Today, it’s become the more workaday gathering of threads of ideas to be developed, polished, perhaps even published.

 

     As the editor of Confluence, I have no intention of doing reviews of the fine works published here.  Each of you, as reader, will have that enjoyment yourself.  Personally, however, I would have relished the role of early viewer of several pages or so from the jottings that gave birth to the quality and diversity here. Consider their published work carefully, as likely having begun from earlier jottings, the writer’s “stepping stones.”

 

     Congratulations to our submitters and enjoyment to our readers.

 

Gary D. Swaim, Editor-in-Chief
gswaim@smu.edu

 

Appreciation to our AGLSP President, Deborah Finkel, for her service as Interim Editor during my recent illness.

 

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