Others have written on this site about the dreary weed-pulling of reading through the slush pile, but I want to take a moment to describe that moment all editors live for when lightning strikes, the air around you suddenly seems to crackle, and you want to leap from your chair, clutching a manuscript, and cry out, “Yes!” It happens from time to time, even to the most weary of editors: not the slowly gathering sense of work that’s been well-crafted, but the bright flash of a living idea, which takes you by surprise and refuses to conform to any expectations, staying one step ahead of you as you read until that moment when — to your regret ??? you find that you’ve reached the final deft trick and the performance abruptly ends. At that moment, I usually discover that I’ve been holding my breath, afraid that one wrong step on the author’s part could shatter that delicate house of glass, and it’s with relief that I set the manuscript aside, feeling that what can so often seem like impossibly-high editorial standards are justified after all.
For me, that experience happened most recently with a play that appears in the current issue ??? Bret Fetzer and Juliet Waller’s Avalanche ??? which showed up without warning in my box one morning last year. It’s a perfectly-structured one-act play, built on a series of repeated scenes that gather comic effect with the inevitability of a well-told joke. But what really caught my attention was how the authors find ways to surprise their reader within that structure of repetition, creating a miniature world with its own perfect and absurd logic, even as they reveal unexpected depths in characters that might otherwise appear broadly and swiftly sketched. It’s a brilliant piece of work, a play that comes to life as well on the page as it might on the stage, and when I opened my copy of the most recent issue, I was delighted to find that it lost none of its charm over the intervening months. Take a few minutes to read it. Then I think you’ll understand why we keep at it, reading every submission that comes to us with such care. I wouldn’t have missed this one for the world.