new letters magazine: hot off the press

The latest issue of New Letters features some of the banana fiber dolls made in Uganda at the orphanage and adorned by Kansas City artists. New Letters has been a steadfast supporter of Change the Truth over the years, having featured some of my Ugandan photos in this past issue. Editor Bob Stewart has shown interest in our project since the very beginning, and I am so grateful to him for that. He selected my doll for this volume's cover. The dolls that grace the inside pages are by:

Peregrine Honig
Tom Corbin
Stephanie Leedy
Amy Meya
Caroline Shteamer
Philomene Bennett
Lou Marak
Fiona Gowin
Janet Kuemmerlein
Shea Gordon
Charmalee Gunaratne
Linda Lighton

Here is Bob's beautiful introduction:

"Out in the World
an editor’s note

Poetry teaches by example. The phrase occurs to me often when I read great poems, which tend to celebrate external details, directness, and even self-questioning by the speaker. This is how one should live, I sometimes think—outward looking, humble, engaged. Great writing provides us examples, not in what the writing says to do, but in what it does. Please do not actually try 'Cooking with Medicine,' as a poem here advises, but do try to imagine the spirit from which that notion came.

In their own crazy, intense, and provocative way, the writing and art in this issue create something close to purity of intent. Good will. The writing looks at events—political, global, and personal—and struggles toward empathy. I am, by default, contrasting that enormous force of generosity and freedom with the calculating and dangerous actions that led to the oil-spill catastrophe in the Gulf. We ask of literature that it look outward, rather than to the writer’s own interests. We ask of art that it have a stake in the world.

Consider the photographs here of banana-fiber dolls made by Ugandan orphans, further decorated by artists in the Kansas City area. New Letters has an ongoing interest in the St. Mary Kevin Orphanage Motherhood in Kajjansi, Uganda, where these dolls originated, and our fall 2006 issue featured photographs of many of the children there. The photographer, Gloria Baker Feinstein, created this doll project to raise money for the orphanage; so, besides being an important visual artist, she has taken on the well- being of those Ugandan children as one of her life’s jobs.

Is this perspective on literature and art realistic? I hold to it. Otherwise, why move this writing into the world, by magazine, radio, Web site, and public events, as does New Letters? Why try so hard? The writing in this issue suggests some reasons. Start with joy. Look around."

-Robert Stewart