Just Out of Reach
Greetings, Spring. Here in name and date, yet you still hunker, hail dropping like small, felled birds from my blue sky. But I will greet you anyway, because I love you, and I want you to be here.
In Volume 4, Issue 2 of Club Plum, the ones we love are often out of reach. Sometimes they are our mothers, right beside us, their mental illness having stolen them away. Sometimes they are our fathers, very old and wheelchair-bound, war-demon wrestling blocking us from what could have been.
In this issue, our characters and our family, our friends and our ghosts reside in shelters and nursing homes, in laundromats and restaurants, in TVs, trees and memories, and in all these places, there is longing.
Thank you for joining us in this middle place as we wait and wish for our new season.
Yours in words and art,
Thea
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Thea Swanson View All →
Thea Swanson is a feminist atheist who holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University in Oregon. She is the Founding Editor of Club Plum Literary Journal, and her poetry, fiction, essays and reviews are published in places such as World Literature Today, Mid-American Review and Northwest Review.
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Hi there Thea!
So happy to receive your email, and have to tell you I cried, literally, a grown man!, when I saw the song you included for me. It is so beautiful and so timely and so cathartic for me. I just can’t express how touched I am and was. In some strange kind of way, I feel that that song has made me realize how important people like you are who get it, who try to get that art out there and who are willing to take that always risky deeper dive into the tenderness of life.
Also, this is timely too because I just put dad in the hospital, so I’m a little raw, and needed a hand through a wall of Easter redemption.
Just to say thanks is not enough. I think the best way to thank you is to try to submit more things to you, not for me, but as a way of continuing the journey, or sojourn of that old kind of mad, perhaps even to turn it around, as a sequel into a new kind of Spring.
Much love and thank you again for this gorgeous lovely song for me. So thoughtful, and in regards to your intro to this posting of Club Plum, I love you too!
Jeff
P.S. My podcast, Knee Deep, has a nice piece, I think, on that walk into hail, and the newness of grace at Easter. It is called “Grace that Brought Us Safe Thus Far.”
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Hi, Jeff– I am quite moved by your words, and I am so very happy that you were touched so deeply by the song chosen to accompany your gorgeous, tender and important piece. Know that your words matter, and you matter.
I wish you peace in these days of difficulties with your father, and I hope you find moments of joy through it all.
And thank you for all your kind words! Keep creating your wonderful words and art.
Warmly,
Thea
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