beach scene

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.

Issue 24

Spell for Misheard Sound

                                                                                                    “7°F last night. Can’t stop singing Johnny Shines:                                                                                                     ‘So cold in Vietnam, words don’t sound the same.’”                                                                                                     —Jake Adam York, Twitter, December 10, 2012 Last…

First Things Last

The end of the story is clear: the end of my parents as I once knew them. But where exactly did their end begin? I…

Rost, Metal Brave

                                                                                                      -On a mountainside in the Nora Sacred Lands A shadow rolls over the icecap,                 smothers a lighthouse subsumed by steel eclipse. Braids drape the glass,…

Even Birds

As a romantic, I sometimes take the evidence of love in nature as proof and prophecy, especially when it comes from birds. I used to…

Self Portrait con Valencia

In ninth grade I discovered chemistry— intrigued by sodium, the soft metals                          …

Shepherds Take Warning

The hum of Rudy Bartles’s crop duster made us look up over the geek tent into the barren blue of the northern sky.  I-R-E-N-E in…

The Last Days of Paradise

The Last Days of Paradise We popped pills that made us feel like jazz, in our sealed, sub-nautical scream. When the world came crashing down,…

We Were All There

Down at the river’s lip                                                      we strip and wheel off the dock like moon-mad children, strewn into brackish nights                                                      with wounds we don’t…

Editorial Team
Managing Editor: Madison Rahner
Assistant Managing Editor: Veronica Good
Copyeditor: Rose Pleasant
Design Editor: Lindsay Hickman
Fiction Editor: Rob Sperduto
Nonfiction Editor: Kayla Jessop
Assistant Nonfiction Editor: Victor Cocco
Poetry Editor: Brittany Atkinson
Assistant Poetry Editor: Olivia Dimatteo

Faculty Editors
Editor-in-Chief: Colin Foote Burch
Digital Content Coordinator: Alli Crandell
Fiction Editor: Jeremy Griffin
Nonfiction Editor: Lane Osborne