March 20, 2021
Riddled with Arrows Literary Journal was launched in 2017 as a safe space for writers to talk about their craft through metafiction, ars poetica and writing about writing. Surely such a thing is needed now while we are living through unprecedented “interesting” times. As writers, it will fall to us to record what happened and what it was like for future readers.
Though the journal has been on indefinite hiatus due to the editor’s medical misfortunes, we are ressurrected today to present this special pandemic issue. Our intentions were threefold: 1) to create space for writers to process their experiences of the last year through their art 2) to help in some small way to keep working writers working in these uncertain times and 3) to feature, wherever possible, yet-unheard pandemic writing.
A once-working writer myself I know that, like Christmas décor on sale in October, the market has only so much time for Covid spring—even though we’re still in it. Still waiting for a vaccine, or a verdict, or a resolution, or a reckoning; still brushing off the rubble and taking stock, searching for each other, or ourselves, or just a safe place to mourn what we have lost.
The result is Riddled with Arrows 4.1: “Message in a Bottle”—our tenth issue, also our biggest and most ambitious to date, featuring words and images of forty creators from far-flung points around the globe.
As ever, the diversity in genre and style and variations on a theme herein are a testament to the provocative possibilities of metafiction and ars poetica—just as the works of these artists and writers are testament to the resilience of the human spirit. I hope it evokes, inspires, empowers, consoles, informs, absolves, challenges, guts, and heals you, just as being its curator and host has done for me. If nothing else, may it give you an entertaining literary respite and stay-cation getaway to Meta Island:
population you.
–> Shannon Connor Winward, Editor
Riddled with Arrows Literary Journal
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