Posted by Madeline Herrick, GD Poetry Editor for 3.1
After months of weeding and pruning, we are proud to introduce Gandy Dancer 3.1, the most exciting edition yet. I personally can’t wait to hold the final product in my hands, especially since we could not have created such an impressive magazine without the amazing contributions from students all across New York State.
This year, we had the most submissions yet. As a result, this Gandy Dancer will be filled with forty-five unique pieces, including a Post Script section featuring SUNY Brockport alum Nate Pritts. This edition also launches our Gandy Dancer Award in Creative Nonfiction, won by Chloe Forsell for “Water and Light.” Look for it in the early pages of our magazine: we proudly display it as the headlining piece for this publication!
Our featured artist is Denise Seidler, a student from SUNY Cortland. We chose her “Within Reach,” a beautiful portrait of a woman by a graveyard, for our cover. It’s a different look from our previous covers and we love it for that as well as its mood. The woman’s calm demeanor suggests she is waiting for something–maybe a train?
While we have included contributions from several different SUNY schools, Geneseo’s Erin Koehler and her four accepted pieces blew us away. Her three poems all skip along the edges of reality while keeping the readers “search[ing] for seeds sown by clown fish, dropped / from the mouth of eel spit grins.” In addition to Erin’s poetry, we also accepted her creative nonfiction piece titled “The Phototroph,” a beautiful essay with vivid imagery paired with an unapologetic look at how tragedy can alter a life.
Our inclusion of multiple pieces from Seidler and Koehler does not take away from the other exceptional work that completes issue 3.1. As you turn the pages—or click on different links—you’ll find that it’s impossible not to appreciate what the writers (and artists) put into their creations. Look for flash fiction from Oswego’s Cassidy Carroll and a poetry translation done by Geneseo’s Amy Elizabeth Bishop. Immerse yourself in a family’s Italian history with Kathryn Bockino; listen with Lore McSpadden as her “ballads slow stitch a low hem / on a mud dappled cloak.” The diversity of 3.1 reveals how talented SUNY students are. We’re kind of proud, as you can tell. We hope you’ll like what you read, and that you’ll find, as we did, that everything fits together like a puzzle, and each piece comes to life in light of what surrounds it.