FAREWELL
Dear Readers,
It is time for me to retire from being a poetry editor for Halfway Down the Stairs, after eight years. It has been a great run! The crew pulling the levers behind this beautiful website — the team I have had the privilege to be a part of — will continue to work to bring you great fiction, nonfiction and poetry.
I recently had my second collection of poetry published, Having Lived. I was interested in finding reviews for the book. Karen, the editor-in-chief at Kelsay Books, told me to go out to all the journals where I had had a poem published and ask for reviews. It was sad to find that almost half of them were no longer publishing!
I am bringing this up because during all these years at Halfway Down the Stairs, the thought of shutting down has never come up once. And for years to come, I hope this wonderful journal continues to be online!
Enough said…I want to keep this short so that you can devote your time to reading the literature available in this issue. And don’t forget to check out past issues, too.
In closing, I’d like to offer you one of my favorite quotes about poetry:
“A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the — surely not aways strong — hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on the shoreline of the heart.”
— Paul Celan
PS: Keep reading! Keep writing!
— Joseph Murphy, Senior Poetry Editor
© 2018, Joseph Murphy
Halfway Down the Stairs 