Title Goes Here: Riddled with Arrows Foreword 5.4

Summer 2022

Open.

As much as we love a good, challenging theme here at Riddled with Arrows, we also know that sometimes the creative mind just needs space to run free. Tabula Rasa, the blank screen, the backyard gate gaping wide—can you see it? Will you heed it, the call to adventure?

Welcome to Riddled with Arrows 5.4.

For this “Open-Themed” Summer Issue we asked for writing on any subject or theme, so long as it qualifies as metafiction or “writing that centers the process and product of writing as art” (which as you know is our whole thing).

We held fewer spots for poetry due to the concurrently-running Ars Poetica Prize—read the winning poems in this issue! We meant to only take a few, for the sake of those who don’t “do” contests (for any number of valid reasons). We didn’t expect our favorites to make friends, but you know how it is. These things take on a life of their own. As with every Riddled project, we soon found the submissions we liked most were already in conversation with one another, in variations and evolutions of themes we had not planned for, but happily invited in.  

As artists we must be open to wherever it is the work wants to go.

The words and images in this issue of Riddled with Arrows worked very hard to get here—a gift, from us to you, wrapped up in string with a tag that says, Read Me, weighty and slightly damp as it drops at your feet. 

Go on. Open it.

See where it takes you.

–> Shannon Connor Winward

Riddled with Arrows 5.4:
“Open-Theme”


Open Fiction | Open Poetry
Open Foreword | Open Ars Poetica
Open Contents | Open Contributor Bios
Close this Issue