Now
entering its third year, Redux, the online magazine I
founded/edit, has just published its 100th writer! That translates to more than 100 stories,
essays, and poems that have been previously published in literary journals that
are now available on the internet, finding a new audience online…so important
in these “end of paper” times we live in.
Of
course I love everything selected for Redux,
whether it was chosen by me personally or by one of our fine advisory editors*,
but I did save an extra-amazing essay to appear as lucky number one
hundred: “Your
Hand Is My Hand” by Catherine Chung, which was first published in The Journal in 2007. It is, the author noted on Facebook when
sharing the link, “the first piece I ever published, and the one closest to my
heart.”
It’s
a gorgeous essay, about love and cancer and hope and vulnerability and family;
you may need a box of tissues nearby as you read:
About a month ago I had a tumor excised from my left breast. The tumor was 3.3 cm in diameter, roughly the size of a ping pong ball, and was located under my left nipple. When it first appeared a year and a half ago, I told it, “You can stay so long as you respect the balance.” But in its last months it had spurned the balance and grown, rising to the surface so that it was visible: an alien marking out its territory. It started to develop what felt like appendages. It began to pull my nipple back into my breast, so that the skin around it puckered and collapsed.
*Special
thanks to our hard-working and super-smart advisory editors: Deborah Ager,
Marlin Barton, Joseph M. Schuster, and Steve Ello. I couldn’t do it
without you!
And
there are still a few more days left in our open reading period, if you’d like
to send in a previously published story/essay/poem for consideration. Here
are the submission guidelines.