EDITOR'S PREVIEW OF ISSUE 20  -  FALL 2025

Good Reading !    Photo by Weebly.com

PREVIEW OF THIS ISSUE
by Matt Ginsburg
from the Editorial Board

It's that time of year again, another issue of Vistas & Byways is ready for press. How did six months pass so quickly? Does time really accelerate as we get older, or does it just feel that way?

For our 10th anniversary, the question felt especially urgent. A decade of publication—where did it go? So we asked our writers to explore their own relationships with time and they delivered. The essays that follow depict moments when time revealed itself as something personal and altogether different from what we assumed it to be.
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Beyond our time-themed essays, this issue also includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction spanning a variety of other themes, as well as photo essays exploring Places out of Time: locations that seem suspended outside the ordinary flow of history.

Before revealing some highlights, we extend a warm welcome to six new contributors:
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Margaret Gannon
Ann Grogan
MaryLee McNeal 
Horehound Stillpoint
Barbara Stevenson 
Pat Usner 
 
Congratulations! We hope to hear from all of you time and time again.

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Now, let’s look at what’s inside.
 
In “Klau Pavilion,” Richard Marino recounts a pivotal moment from 1970. Having just come out to his parents, he’s sent to a psychiatric unit, “a place where crazies go,” for therapy. His mother cried in anguish. His reaction was different.
 
In “Moroccan Mirage,” the sight of crumbling adobe homes reminds Kathryn Santana Goldman of an old friend. He would have turned 78 that day. Conjuring a series of memories she celebrates with him anyway, imagining that they:
 
                  Eat lamb tagine, drink mint tea,
                  and talk about all the things left unsaid.
 
What’s it like to leap from a plane into “a blast that rips your face and tumbles your body” as you freefall at 120 mph? In “When Time Stood Still,” Pat Usner provides a gripping account of skydiving, where a few seconds can feel like an eternity and “Where will I land?” is the least of her worries.
 
“LSD was my home remedy for 15 years,” writes Horehound Stillpoint in his poem, “The Demon Whose Number Came Up.” Echoing the libertine poets of the Beat generation, Stillpoint takes readers on a stream-of-consciousness journey through the psychedelic wilderness. But as he writes, “nothing prepared me for turning seventy three.”
 
“Her boy, her only boy,” marvels a mother rocking her newborn son. And what about her daughters playing nearby, “sensing their altered place?” Margaret Gannon’s poem “History of the World,” answers that question brutally:
 
                    Sons, daughters, all loved,
                    but not the same.
 
During a layover in Munich, Karen Marker visits the Museum of Clocks and finds herself contemplating how time shapes our most cherished experiences. In “At the Museum of Clocks,” she meditates on the different ways we measure our lives: through mechanical precision, prayer, or just the way “the earth circled, spun, tilted into the equinox.”

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There are many more stories, essays, poems, and of course photos to discover in the current issue of Vistas & Byways. We encourage readers to linger over the issue. There’s no reason to hurry, take your time.

   

Congratulations to Us!
Launch Party - Oct. 24, 2025
​160 Spear St.  San Francisco
Photo by Charlene Anderson

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Time in Limbo 
by Amee Shah