VOLUME 1 — NUMBER 2.5

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Up the Creek

with Joy E. Stocke

A young woman awakens to the chant of a monk in a monastery high on a mountaintop in eastern India, while in New York City, a young man gets on a train to Brooklyn beginning a journey that will ultimately take him through the city’s five boroughs. Meanwhile, a Burmese exile interviews an Eritrean exile about art and the definition of home. And two poets in separate interviews discuss the origins of poetry, the origins of consciousness.

The second issue of the Wild River Review gathers a chorus of voices to examine the human condition in all its beauty and grittiness. Much of the mystery inherent in our lives comes from those who go out into the “forest” and come back to give us clues as to how we might live more fully.

In our age of global trade, where in China a deal can be struck to manufacture the chair you are sitting on, what are the moral implications? These questions are raised and explored in “Confessions of a Global Traveler.”

And what happens when our Paris correspondent takes off for Indonesia? And why should we care about the philosopher William James? As philosophy professor William Cole Kiernan says, the answer rests in James’s view of the world where possibility continually exists in the “ever not quite.”

And so we encourage reader, writer, artist, and blogger to explore the “ever not quite” because the world of the internet is not a static one, but rather a portal where one question can lead to a multiplicity of answers or perhaps to another question or to no answer at all.

From global trade to our own backyards, Wild River Review’s chorus of voices continues to grow. The seemingly ordinary roles of wifedom and motherhood are portrayed in a new column, “The Triple Goddess Trials,” and in the essay “I’m not Psychic, But...” where a mother of three boys strikes a tenuous household balance. The rallying cry of a grandmother proclaiming her singleness and sexuality in “The Age of Reasonable Doubt” pushes the envelope of politeness for those whom our culture calls “senior citizens.”

This issue also launches new work in the field of genre where horror and science fiction writing take us even deeper into our subconscious through the realm of mystery and imagination. In addition, a new blogger joins Jill Sherer and Raquel B. Pidal. In August our new blogger — who will use a pen name — will head to Iraq to work as a prison guard. From there he will send regular reports.

So visit us often, check for updates, respond to the columnists and bloggers, join us in a conversation as tame or as wild as our minds and hearts will let us be.

— Joy E. Stocke
Co-Executive Editor
jstocke@wildriverreview.com

Joy E. Stocke

Bio: Joy E. Stocke is Co-Founder of the Wild River Review. She is author of a novel, Ugly Cookies (Pella Publishing, 2000) and a volume of bilingual (English/Greek) narrative poems, The Cave of the Bear (Pella Publishing, 1999) based on her travels in Crete. She has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and has written about and lectured widely on her travels in Turkey and Greece, as well as religion, ancient and modern. She appeared on the syndicated NPR radio program A Chef’s Table in May 2004 to talk about Turkish Cuisine. In addition to a literary travel memoir, Anatolian Days and Nights, she is working on her second book of poems set in Greece, and a novel set in the U.S., Germany, and Crete for which she was awarded a fellowship at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, IL. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a Bachelor of Science in Home Economics/Journalism, she participated in the Lindisfarne Symposium on The Evolution of Consciousness with William Irwin Thompson at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. Currently she is completing a three-year program in Tantric Studies at the Saraswati River Yoga School in New Hope, PA.