winter 2024
Issue No. 20
Dear Readers,
This issue marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Stonecoast Review, now firmly established among student-led literary magazines. Issue #20 of the Review continues our legacy of discovering and encouraging new and diverse voices.
Discovery and self-discovery have also emerged as prominent themes in this issue’s contributions, although characters’ epiphanies were not always met with enthusiasm. Sydney Lea’s “Giudizio Dolce” depicts the chastened narrator when his narrow, perhaps unjustified, view of a classmate from the past is revealed. While monitoring the online dating activity of “The Man in the Window Seat,” Robert Granader’s narrator is startled into wakefulness about the state of his own marriage.
Self-discovery is celebrated in Carla Sarett’s “Self-Portrait as Aging Tortoise,” a condition she never envisioned, but which has its advantages. The young character in Sarah Jackson’s “Coherence” struggles with their gender identity but is surprised and comforted by their uncle’s model of fluidity for physical substances and time. Danielle Frimer’s play, “a marriage is a story we keep telling,” engages a same-sex couple in a conversational journey, one that initially causes them to recoil against traditional wedding rituals, but concludes with discovering marriage’s special meaning for them.
And the narrator in Nuala O’Connor’s “Smoke in a Jar” finally understands her neurodivergent mind after decades of mystifying herself and others with its workings.
Thank you for reading the Stonecoast Review; enjoy the discoveries you make inside.
Sincerely,
Mary White
Editor-in-Chief
The Man in the Window Seat
He pinches and pulls at the pictures on his phone, deciphering them like code. Every now and then he gets distracted and focuses on a background: a pair of boots, a fancy car. But mostly he studies the face, as if he’s preparing to write a dissertation comparing it to the Mona Lisa.
Softly They Fall
The distant hum of an approaching vehicle cuts through the quiet of Westmore, Vermont. It vibrates off the frozen midnight air, air that is charged and heavy with soon-to-fall snow, air that holds more promise than the mess of metal and wire in front of me.
Oyster City Under Water
Morning dawns gunwale gray and wet in Oyster City. The hurricane, first a roar in the night, then a howl, now a whisper of sea spray over the coast, barrels farther inland. Curtains of rain hang in the silence between gusts. The city stirs, ready to probe its wounds.
