In this 28th edition of Waccamaw, the Nigerian poet Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo unpacks the meaning of “ambit,” defined as “a sphere of action, expression, or influence,” in Merriam-Webster. It’s a fitting word for this issue, which features winners of the South Carolina Creative Sociology Competition. The competition invited written works from undergraduate and graduate student writers across the state who are committed to taking action for social justice by addressing challenges such as those facing Black Children, the global climate, school libraries, and more. Other works in this issue express the lasting effects of abusive fathers on families, and the trauma of car accidents experienced by expectant mothers. All of the works in this issue of Waccamaw illuminate the broad range of influences on the human experience, from difficult themes of identity, borders, and family to more uplifting themes of rekindled romance, marital bonds, and carnivorous plants.
Editor’s Note
Introduction
In this issue, our contributors invite you to read the crossed-out words, to rename your family members, to unstitch yourself for a lover, to risk Alaskan waters, to spend Christmas with strangers, to search for ghosts with your sister in the depths of a lake, to keep everything that might become a story or a poem. Welcome to the 27th edition of Waccamaw.
Introduction
As one of our contributors reminds us, we’re 60% water and we’re used to moving against it. In this issue, water is an abiding presence: cleansing, creating, renewing, destroying. In grief, a woman climbs over a rocky shoreline to swim in salty water, where everything is silent except that rushing noise. To test the shells of cannoli, sisters place them in boiling water, where even in water, they stay intact. An illicit lover is stranded on volcanic rocks as the tide rolls in, where the seals pass below without glancing up at her. Where the sand migrates south to some other coastal town, engineers dredge sand from the ocean floor to hold off the eroding effects of beachfront development and climate change. Moored between our namesake river and the Atlantic Ocean, in the heavy heat of Carolina, we lifted this 26th issue of Waccamaw from the water–like a good bird flying.
Introduction
In this 25th issue of Waccamaw, our contributors dreamt. They dreamt of bones “rewritten and rescripted and then reburied with dirt and snow and sweat,” of electrical storms in a grandfather’s heart, of our house illuminated with gaslight, and of nestlings born too soon under winter’s sky. They dreamt Johnny Cash singing, “I don’t like it but I guess things happen that way,” as stars burn out and fall. But they found more than bitter moments and afternoons near the end. They remembered a shared cigarette after a devastating tornado, acknowledged hate and love for a father, half dream and half ghost.
Pandemic-deep in Zoom meetings, we dreamed up an issue for a devastating year that demanded new images and new voices.
Introduction
Before the pandemic set in, we began to see what the writers had to share. We found moon-mad children and brackish nights. We found women holding off violence with clothing irons as tornadoes dropped from the sky. We found a poet in a green suit and heard the horse-shift of carousels gone dark. We found parents lost and alone. We found patriarchal watchdogs with their murderous offspring, yet we also found elementos that bonded so facilito.
We found these images, heard these stories, and felt these sounds unaware they were whispering of a difficult new era.
Welcome to the 24th issue of Waccamaw.
Introduction
Welcome to the 23rd Issue of Waccamaw,
Our favorite rivals are beauty and pain: pink skies in the evening
traffic, sad women hanging on the walls of museums,
violins echoing off hot pavement as old men busk for spare change.
In these pages, find the small details that remember you. Bring them
up in conversation, like ice breakers.
You’ll leave from the same dock, but you’ll never cross the same river.
With the testimonies of this edition, we are not adrift. As long as we glimpse
either beauty or pain, we have rudders, paddles, sails.
Love,
The Waccamites
An Introduction
Welcome to the 22nd Issue of Waccamaw,
This year, the water snaked its way in diamond coats to new places—reached in and pulled us out of where we thought we belonged. Now, we root ourselves in blooms of old blood, return birthmarks and all to the wild Atlantic. We recraft ourselves from jaw bones, not rib bones. We have learned, again, softness in our hardness and hardness in our softness. We now know what art can do when all we feel like is rocks ground down.
We offer to you our hope that this issue sleeps child-like within your skull, that it explodes neon with galaxies, pixels, minnows, and magic.
We are thankful for the dark and formless, the light and overgrown, and even our own miscalculations.
May we swim sloppy through this rainy season with rivered throats and blue, regrown veins. May we fall, fly up, and roar again. May we always glow with knowledge.
Love,
The Waccamites
An Introduction
Welcome to the 21st Issue of Waccamaw,
We are glad after our storm again, and our storm again, and as these fires blaze, to bare the weapons that curl our skulls. As feasts trace our breath, and when our griefbooks are an unclean escape, we must redirect the flow. We are out in the street pajamas and all.
The search sometimes leads to a shed. Our fingers pressed against our will. Is guilt the point? Our clench and swallow is only a flutter, an arrhythmia attached to dirt. Under the house we tuck these shootings, birds, hair, a compost thick with what is supposed. That rough knuckled enough.
We wrap in the Atlantic. Our eyes flood blood wide.
The trunk ground to sawdust survives even death. Spray it with milk. Soften the knocks and tuck the jumps. Rage with your signs. But I repeat: Let us keep our pencils.
We hope to be wolves moaning torrents in the dumb dark name of progress. That our blooms beat against the beasts we are.
And we are wishing you high ground. Clear air. Your signs.
Love,
The Waccamites
An Introduction
Dear Readers,
This is our tenth year and twentieth issue here at Waccamaw, and in this new decade we’ve been thinking about firsts. We have had a lot of firsts here in recent years. The first student-run issue. The first print edition (available here). The first time we were called upon to organize with our community to help a friend. In our larger context there have been firsts too. The first time we witnessed a streak of light across the country in the shape of the voices of teens.
In these pages you will find echoes of this light and the black hole that slurps at it. You’ll find the oddness of our world, windshield caught. Mineral silhouettes of mothers melting scars in a thousand formless disasters. You will talk to names. The outer bands will hand you keys. Your mouth may disappear into your father’s, your brother’s, and reemerge where the flashing lights on the road board speak like a heart. You may have a conversation there. You are probably not made of bronze. Chances are you have so many insides your skin gardens into taste and ribbons around your wrist, your jaw unhinged half the time. You are probably, as we speak, reaching to phone your grandchildren, being the grandchildren, reaching over the throbbing fence to find something as strong as you are. May you get there.
May you write in rhymes of draperies and bring gold if you got it. May you pack throats with new worlds. And should water (or its absence) ever betray you, we will be here to face the floated up worlds. Ready with the machete.
Or maybe some baked goods.
Yours,
The Waccamites
Masthead
Student Editorial Team:
Managing Editor – Lanessa Salvatore
Co-Managing Editor – Alisa Alice
Design Editor – Nikki Russell
Fiction Editor – Ben Counts
Co-Fiction Editor – Rachel VanRensselaer
Nonfiction Editor – Sadie Shuck
Poetry Editor – Nicholas Powell
10th Anniversary Print Edition Editor – Maggie Fernandes
Faculty Editorial Team:
Digital Content Coordinator – Alli Crandell
Editor – Jessica Lee Richardson
Fiction Editor – Jeremy Griffin
Nonfiction Editor – Colin Burch
Poetry Editor – Hastings Hensel
Welcome to the 19th Issue of Waccamaw
Welcome to the 19th Issue of Waccamaw,
We are almost a decade. We are almost. We are a reach that with its open extended hand may catch a loblolly in its grip and not let go. Our eyes in the night were replaced with a giant’s and we are digging down now, excavating, ablaze. Some of our categories are classic: ribbons, antifreeze, undiscovered facts. Some scrape at the film of class with clever little ham soft fists.
We have been sent into a frenzy of chalk print dances listening to how we thought of ourselves as the static of speckled debris.
The whole piñata gut of the world has been hazed.
Despite it we are brazen. Vibey. Locating us where we try to be.
This issue gets us subcutaneous, where we dream wealth in a drain of stars, our giant’s eyes wide with mutter. We search the pronoun mouths of your firsts where I turns on itself. This issue bows toward the frost of our ignored homes and with its head to the ground, points us on our way.
We are on our way.
Join us.
Love,
The Waccamites
Masthead
Student Editorial Team:
Managing Editor – Lanessa Salvatore
Co-Managing Editor – Ben Counts
Design Editor – Khrysta Boulavsky
Fiction Editor – Gabriel Miller
Non-fiction Editor – Sadie Shuck
Poetry Editor – Victoria Green
Poetry Editor & Digital Content Partner – Alisa Alice
Reader & 10th Anniversary Print Edition Editor – Maggie Fernandes
Faculty Editorial Team:
Digital Content Coordinator – Alli Crandell
Editor – Jessica Lee Richardson
Fiction Editor – Jeremy Griffin
Non-Fiction Editor – Colin Birch
Poetry Editor – Hastings Hensel
An Introduction
Let me also speak directly to the transgender community itself. Some of you have lived freely for decades. Others of you are still wondering how you can possibly live the lives you were born to lead. But no matter how isolated or scared you may feel today, the Department of Justice and the entire Obama Administration wants you to know that we see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.
— U.S. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, May 9, 2016
We see you. Of all the words Loretta Lynch used last spring in her statement announcing the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against North Carolina in response to that state’s “bathroom bill,” these three might have been the most significant. Official Governmental America (i.e. “we”) speaking directly and publicly to a community that has historically been ignored at best and mocked, victimized, and persecuted at worst was already a breakthrough. But what Lynch said in that direct message to the transgender community—that the Administration sees you—was truly remarkable.
Visibility is a word that works in both directions. The ability to see. And also the ability to be seen. I imagine that for many trans individuals, the goal for a long time was invisibility, a seamless blending-in. Passing. Maybe that’s still the goal for many. But I wonder if we see you signaled not only a newfound willingness and ability of institutional America to see the transgender community but also an increasing desire by the trans community to be seen. A desire for more than benign neglect, a desire for honest appreciation.
Lynch could have said we hear you, which would have been meaningful but might also have reinforced the outdated notion that the transgender community is shouting from the shadows as opposed to marching proudly down Main Street. But she didn’t say hear. She said see. Surely this was no accident. As well-crafted and -considered as Lynch’s statement was, her choice to say we see you was no doubt intentional.
But what fueled the intention? Was it the audience? Is the transgender community especially attuned to the performative aspects of gender, and therefore to the aesthetics, to the visualization? Or is we see you a function of the ever-increasing video-ization of our social interactions? The linguistic manifestation of the GIF, the Vine, the You Tube post? The fact that today visual image carries more currency than text?
Perhaps one of the most fulfilling things that can happen to any us is to have our visibility acknowledged publicly—whether it be by our Instagram followers or by Official Governmental America. If that’s true, then is the inverse also true? Is the most demoralizing thing not to be seen? Not to be acknowledged?
Because now, a year later, there’s a new Attorney General, a new President. And so far there hasn’t been any effort on the part of this new administration to “see” or “stand with” any historically marginalized community. The new “we” looks inward rather than outward. So what does visibility mean now? In an effort to find out, Waccamaw asked for poems, stories, and essays loosely based on that theme. The result is what you see here: urgent writing that establishes that “we” and our collective ability to see and be seen can survive four solipsistic years.
Masthead
Editor: Jessica Lee Richardson
Guest Editor: Joe Oestreich
Founding Editor: Dan Albergotti
Fiction Editor: Jeremy Griffin
Nonfiction Editor: Colin Burch
Poetry Editor: Hastings Hensel
Readers: Lydia Denoyer and Lauren Higgins
Managing Editor: Kimberly Holcombe
Co-Managing Editor: Maggie Fernandes
Associate Fiction Editor: Ronda Taylor
Associate Nonfiction Editor: Anne Gammon
Associate Poetry Editor: Lanessa Salvatore
Special Project Editors: Amanda Taylor and Chelsea Thomas
Art and Design Editor: Joujou Safa
Digital Content Coordinator: Alli Crandell
Home Page Photograph: Amy Jarvis
A Welcome to the 17th Issue of Waccamaw
Welcome to the 17th Issue of Waccamaw,
It was a fall when rivers got rowdy, flooded us harder than ocean. What was supposed to happen is not what happened.
The coast after our hurricane was fine. It was inland that got it, the heart of the place twisted and soaked, a skeleton canopy of trees arching closed roads.
Then there is this other storm.
These fleshy bodies of ours. Pitched against one another in illusion. We are really beside of course. It is our only position. Clear if you see from the sky. Literature knows this. Knows the complexity of this. Invites you in. We invite you in too. All of you.
These stories and poems were picked from before, from out of that other land in that other time of moons, super and super duper and plain moons, wrists and plants and silence. The wolfblips we were. Believing what we wanted to believe was so adorable. Until it wasn’t.
There is no comfort in confronting what actually is. The truth is an old hag in a house of bones. Few ever find her beauty because her tests are harsh. But here we find hope in the chance. We find hope in each other and how we huddled on the floor over these pages listening for their sounds and were brought together in a kind of melody. We find hope that in the many lives these words tangle with you may catch a glimpse of the hearth.
We find hope in being more than one thing.
We welcome you to be both with us. More. Actual.
Time is just another relationship. Bring it in close.
With Love,
The Waccamaw Editors
Masthead
Editor: Jessica Lee Richardson
Founding Editor: Dan Albergotti
Fiction Editor: Jeremy Griffin
Nonfiction Editor: Colin Burch
Poetry Editor: Hastings Hensel
Readers: Nicholas Powell
Managing Editor: Kimberly Holcombe
Co-Managing Editor: JouJou Safa
Associate Fiction Editors: Mark Hennion and Emory Hooks
Associate Nonfiction Editor: Anne Gammon
Associate Poetry Editors: Lanessa Salvatore and Maggie Fernandes
Copy Editors: Cody Norris and Lydia Denoyer
Design Editors: Nicole Russell and Lydia Denoyer
Digital Content Coordinator: Alli Crandell
A Welcome To Waccamaw Issue 16
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the sixteenth issue of Waccamaw.
The sixteenth issue of Waccamaw sat us up out of the buzz of the late night slush pile sweating and with fists in the air. We could not look away.
In private we called this the “bearloom” issue. Because it rhymes with “heirloom” and there really are tomatoes. But here what looms beyond spring’s hyper colored blooms and poisons is sometimes large and toothed.
In private we called this issue “flippy.” Because the best is the worst and the worst is the best when it’s told raw. Because of the liminal tangerine of go and the blue behind the streetlights’ halo. Because sometimes a bird is a drone and a dress is a war and water inverts its peaks.
In private this issue refused sharp hard lines. It wanted to confess: I am soft. Sometimes I am soft. Poet-y, even. A willowy curve. But only sometimes. Sometimes I spit venom, catch a bear, rip everything off and go naked. Save my own life.
We do have a few things to confess. First and foremost that we want to invite you in. Urgently. Here. Sit down. Drink this. Heat up. Cool off. Keep your eyes open.
Welcome to the Bearloom Issue. Happy spring.
With Love,
The Waccamites
Masthead
Editor: Jessica Lee Richardson
Founding Editor: Dan Albergotti
Fiction Editor: Jason Ockert
Nonfiction Editor: Colin Burch
Poetry Editor: Hastings Hensel
Readers: Jeremy Griffin, Amanda Taylor, and Chelsea Thomas
Managing Editor: Alysha Cieniewicz
Assistant Fiction Editors: Esther Crompton and Ronda Taylor
Assistant Nonfiction Editor: Lauren Higgins
Assistant Poetry Editor: Nicholas Powell
Copy Editor: Kimberly Holcombe
Design Editors: Kimberly Holcombe and Ronda Taylor
Digital Content Coordinator: Alli Crandell
A Welcome to Waccamaw Issue 15
Welcome to the fifteenth issue of Waccamaw, an online literary journal published at Coastal Carolina University. This issue was launched on November 11, 2015 and was produced in large part by graduate students in our Master of Arts in Writing program.
We are grateful for help from faculty editors, our digital content coordinator Alli Crandell, and for the time and insight of readers Caroline Cahill and Jeremy Griffin.
In this issue, you will find exciting new work by emerging and established writers alike. Our design team chose a warm fall palette for this incarnation of Waccamaw. This works in concert with the time of year, but also with an issue linked by approaches to processes of physical, mental, and linguistic breakdown marked by vibrant sound bursts of color and light. Come sit by the fire pit. Fill your cup.
Our next reading period opens in January and we welcome your submissions.
Thank you for reading. We hope you enjoy the issue.
Yours,
Waccamaw Editorial Team
Masthead
Editor: Jessica Lee Richardson
Founding Editor: Dan Albergotti
Fiction Editor: Jason Ockert
Nonfiction Editor: Joe Oestreich
Poetry Editor: Hastings Hensel
Readers: Caroline Cahill and Jeremy Griffin
Managing Editor: Alysha Cieniewicz
Fiction Assistant Editor: Amy Jarvis
Nonfiction Assistant Editor: Amanda Taylor
Poetry Assistant Editor: Nicholas Powell
Copy Editors: Lauren Higgins and Chelsea Thomas
Design Editors: Esther Crompton, Kimberly Holcombe, and Ronda Taylor
Digital Content Coordinator: Alli Crandell