Editor’s Letter
“I moved into a clapboard house on the outskirts of town and found that, among other flatmates, I was sharing with a man who was on the run from the FBI...Writing that story down now, well, it sounds made up. Small town stories often do."
Issue editors Anna Kiernan and Michael V. Smith discuss small towns, how the impact of their stories and characters - real, imagined, somewhere in-between - can stretch far beyond their geographical size. These towns cease to be a place with shape or edges, and become a visceral memory, a state of mind, an attitude. From the stark loneliness of a snow-covered Canadian town, to the sublime, perfectly ripe plums of an Iranian village, to the lost-yet-found souls of California, these experiences are reflected in the essays, fiction and visual art contained in Issue 5 of The Lit; Small Town Stories.