Letter from the Editor
Design aficionados look forward to the annual christening of Pantone’s Color of the Year. Pantone began as a printing company concerned with pigments and coloured inks. Today it is widely used among graphic designers and product manufacturers and other companies concerned with colour in the physical and digital worlds. The colour of the year event is a nifty marketing gimmick of taste-making, taking note of and setting cultural trends. Colour is an essential part of a poet’s toolbox, something we often use to build vivid imagery or convey a particular mood. But otherwise, Pantone is probably irrelevant to prose poetry. We mention it here because we are tickled by tidbits of juicy synchronicity: 2024 is the year of The Mackinaw’s inauguration. And for 2024, the Pantone colour of the year is Peach Fuzz. The Mackinaw name won out from worthy contenders (I was quite partial to Trout for some time) when I was sharing with my non-poet partner some of the lit circle conversations bandied about on the topic of prose poetry. He was not familiar with the small wars of passion that run through writerly circles in search of definitions and boundaries. When I told him about the opposing teams of yay and nay for prose poetry, how some question its very existence and others find it the most beautiful poetic form of all, he said, “It sounds like the Mackinaw peaches,” and a new era was born. Pantone’s spotlight on the palette we’ve been using to show off The Mackinaw felt auspicious to this editor, one of those seemingly trivial connections that holds just enough magic of affirmation. “PANTONE 13-1023…It’s a velvety gentle peach tone whose all-embracing spirit enriches mind, body, and soul,” according to Pantone itself. Our third issue of The Mackinaw is definitely food for mind, body, and soul, bound to enrich and enrage, pleasure and provoke. We have a handful of selections from a dozen prose poets in each issue, and this time the twelve are all women, another unplanned happenstance to delight in. You will be transported through different perspectives of a starry night with Kathryn Silver-Hajo, and through as many medical appointments with Christa Fairbrother. Helen Pletts plays with the form to create some dazzling prose poems. Lisa Suhair Majaj shows us hunger and rain. We are also delighted to chat with Sally Ashton about her brilliant new collection, Listening to Mars. We invite every reader and writer to become part of The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry by liking and following our new Facebook page. We owe much gratitude to the poet, scholar, and friend Saad Ali who has chosen to generously share his time to grow this social media page, in order to share and promote the talents in these pages. Check out and follow the page, here: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61557995615215 Happy reading! Lorette C. Luzajic |