One of the crucial elements of great art, for me, whether it is music, painting, photography, or writing, is a gushing of emotion. I want the artist to really belt it out. That’s important. Without passion, art is just “nice.” I want my heart to be sucked out of my body for a split second. That is what good art does for me.
My favorite pieces in this first issue of Floodplane, the ones that stuck with me and made me want to read them again, or read more, were those that seemed to spin words into a new fabric. In the prose pieces we included, I found myself speeding on through the story, their words carrying me like winter water racing over rocks. The vivid descriptions in Finn Kraemer’s Mister Perris pulled me along in just this way:
His father's shoes returned; they stopped. They moved onto the carpet. Jonah pulled his legs closer to his body in the tight confines under the table. The shoes stopped in front of him. They flexed and shone and his father's gray pants bagged over them. His face sank slowly into view.
Other times, I read a passage that seemed to catch my lungs in my throat with a quiet, involuntary sob over not just the beauty of the words but the profound capturing of the human experience. At these moments, the words overpowered me, enveloped me, like rising floodwaters. As in this stanza, from Kathryn Gessner’s “Warner Mountain Rain”:
We have the right to fear
the rattlesnake when we can hear it
underfoot, the tail irritable
like rabbit bones beneath the boxes
in our closet.
In the end, the works we chose for this inaugural issue captured the pain, longing, love, and beauty of life, of the human experience, for us in new ways. We hope that some of these works create the chill of bracing winter water across your skin.
Enjoy.
Tempra Board, Editor