Fall 2024 vol 13 no 1

Editorial

91st Meridian got underway in the spring of 2002, one element in the revitalization of the International Writing Program under the directorship of Chris Merrill following its near-demise (the program’s long history was compressed in the recent exhibit IWP@55); it all felt even more urgent after the awe-less shock of 9/11.  

Now, 22 years later, the digital journal format may be meeting its medial limit, as is its retiring staff. Without exactly aiming to taking its place, the program’s new “Say the World” podcast series now offers well-researched & edited conversations with the many intriguing people circulating through the Shambaugh House.

We trust that the journal’s final issue holds up, offering another iteration of fabulous or strange fiction, arresting poetry, unpredictable non-fiction etc. ….  its material still reflecting one way or another “the world as a space of literary transit and translation,” as its mission statement has it.

Anchoring it are five not-so-easy pieces by IWP alums commissioned by UI’s shiny Stanely Museum of Art, inaugurated recently after yet another 500-year flood took out its previous building. Its curators invited 25 alumni of this our Writing University, five of them IWP participants from five continents, to select a work of art from its collection and write a short text in response, then gathered them in the handsome catalog titled In a Time of Witness. Art criticism? Fiction? Essays? Read, judge.

But what more relevant, and harrowing, witness to our time than a letter from the Palestinian writer Yousri Alghoul, close to IWP without having ever quite made it from Gaza to Iowa City.  Contrast it to an altogether different picture of a home, Yotsumoto Yasuhiro’s “unruly,” poem, which offers, per its translator’s introduction, “the voice of Honkomagome itself, [expressing] the country’s tepidness, its seeming apoliticism, its disinterest in anything other than [...] trivial money problems and good food and the like"—a perspective that largely comes from [the poet's] outsider status, having spent many years away from Japan, in the U.S. and Germany.”

Finally, a personal closure, book-ending where we started in 2002. At nearly 100, the program’s co-founder, the remarkable novelist, translator, editor, and administrator Nieh Hualing Engle has had a museum devoted to her open in her native Wuhan province in the PRC. The short precis here documenting the building recognizes, but in no way covers, her life’s achievement.

The Editors