April, 2018
“Why do we paint eggs in spring?” my son asks, fingers mottled with dye. Why do we adorn our houses with their likeness, fill our mouths with them—chocolate, deviled? Why do we delight in spotting spring eggs in the crooks of trees, why do we send out our young to hunt them behind the shed, in the flower bed, the tall grass?
“It’s about new life,” I tell him. The promise of change, the ache of transformation, the relief of renewal. It’s about surprise: the peeling back of wrappers, the crack of the shell, the striptease. It’s a celebration of Schrodinger’s enigma—the thing which exists and also does not exist—yet. It’s about revelation. Awakening. Possibility.
Writing is like that, don’t you think? Not its end result—not the crafted poem, the revised story, the final nest of perfectly rounded words—but rather the process of writing. The what if, the soon, the I will, of writing. The midwifery and engineering. The brave, stupid, defiant, audacious, titillating, terrifying act of it, whatever it is, before it is. Our creation.
Last spring we went from “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” to “Look, we made a thing”; Riddled with Arrows was born/launched with only the niggle of instinct/inspiration to set the course. Now, the season of beginnings has cycled around again: we are five issues strong, fatter with wisdom, fluffy with friendships (you, dear reader/writer, you!) and yet/still feeling that feather-deep itch to wrestle higher branches, to kiss the wind, to make things, to go, go go…
Thus we give you Riddled with Arrows, 2.1: a celebration of our creativity both organic and mechanical, a study of how we move/ what moves us, a reflection of ourselves as we are or were or might be. We hope you find something useful here—scraps for your nestling ideas, or maybe something new to shoot for. Let the stories lift your senses, open up new vistas. Let the poems sing to you, about you—an echo homage.
May you have a happy, productive spring.
–> Shannon Connor Winward