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To Our Readers:
This is the fourth voyage of the online magazine Vistas & Byways (V&B), an OLLI at SF State publication.
Our mission: To seek out new writers with distinct voices in all literary genres, to showcase talented visual artists, to boldly go where no online magazine has gone before!
This will be our only issue for 2017. Needless to say, it’s difficult to sustain the amount of work required by our Web and Editorial teams and other volunteers in order to publish a literary review of genuine merit. We believe this issue has much to commend it.
Many of our regular contributors have returned. Among their pieces, you might want to check out the following:
In addition to our regulars, we’d like to introduce some offerings of new contributors:
And don’t forget to take a look at our Visual Arts Section. You will find original artwork by Juanita Callejas and Charlene Anderson, a collage by Mary Heldman, and Patricia Koren’s “Urban Forest,” a fascinating and at times almost surrealist photographic study of trees in the city.
We hope to continue the publication of Vistas & Byways next year. But we’ll need the help of our local OLLI community to keep going. We can always use help with administrative editorial tasks, publicity, and from individuals with computer graphic skills and familiarity with Weebly.com website construction and maintenance.
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this fourth issue of the magazine.
Editorial Board, Vistas & Byways September 2017
This is the fourth voyage of the online magazine Vistas & Byways (V&B), an OLLI at SF State publication.
Our mission: To seek out new writers with distinct voices in all literary genres, to showcase talented visual artists, to boldly go where no online magazine has gone before!
This will be our only issue for 2017. Needless to say, it’s difficult to sustain the amount of work required by our Web and Editorial teams and other volunteers in order to publish a literary review of genuine merit. We believe this issue has much to commend it.
Many of our regular contributors have returned. Among their pieces, you might want to check out the following:
- So, how did Virgil Bayless, aka “Nassau Daddy,” rip out his eye? Seems every resident of Chillicothe, Ohio circa 1950s has a different version of that notorious story. Fortunately, our resident expert on all matters Chillicothe, Margaret Liddell, is still on the case fifty years after the incident, offering us “Virgil’s Eye: The Authorized Version.”
- Is Anastasia Romanov, aka AnastaCI-a Romanov, as she prefers to be called, crazy? A terrorist? Why is she so desperate to catch a flight sans baggage out of SF International to Montreal which, for some reason, she believes is located in the United States? Mary Heldman uncovers the motives of the distraught Ms. Romanov’s desperate flight in a colorful, poignant and amusing short story, “Don’t Leave Baggage Unintended.”
- In “Life Along the Way,” Cathy Fiorello comes up with a basic formula to grasp the stages on life’s way: Am I out-of-sync or in-sync with the world? After many years of feeling out of step with her peers (early into the workforce, late to motherhood), in old age she discovers she’s happy: Getting paid for what she loves to do, a late-blooming author, and, yes, however briefly, thrust into the midst of “the Boomer-Hottie” movement. In other words, totally in-sync.
In addition to our regulars, we’d like to introduce some offerings of new contributors:
- Dave the Nudist, clad in a provocatively loose-fitting robe, is jauntily making his way poolside, once again the talk of this year’s “Senior Camp,” Al Crowell’s satirical dissection of who’s in and who’s out among the senior set. Only one question remains unanswered as the story moves to its revealing climax: Just how much of Dave’s aging anatomy will be put on open display this year? And…can he be stopped?
- Friendship is one of life’s great consolations. But what if one of the friends is submerged in the daemonic underworld of madness? Vivian Imperiale offers two brief poems, “The Guidepost” and “Hide and Seek,” both dedicated “To my friend with schizophrenia,” each a carefully wrought meditation on the tenuous hold of friendship across the abyss between sanity and madness.
- In “Rescue, Liberate, Rehabilitate,” Jan Robbins gives us a vivid portrait of her friend, Nancy, who has devoted a lifetime to alleviating the suffering of dogs. “When I see the suffering, I can’t turn away. I have to save them,” she says. In addition to a portrait of her friend’s life, Jan reveals some disturbing facts about the often heartless treatment of dogs that, in Nancy’s words, “are totally dependent on people.”
And don’t forget to take a look at our Visual Arts Section. You will find original artwork by Juanita Callejas and Charlene Anderson, a collage by Mary Heldman, and Patricia Koren’s “Urban Forest,” a fascinating and at times almost surrealist photographic study of trees in the city.
We hope to continue the publication of Vistas & Byways next year. But we’ll need the help of our local OLLI community to keep going. We can always use help with administrative editorial tasks, publicity, and from individuals with computer graphic skills and familiarity with Weebly.com website construction and maintenance.
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this fourth issue of the magazine.
Editorial Board, Vistas & Byways September 2017