Issue #80

I usually love the Christmas season for the same reasons many people do – spending time with friends and family, watching football, eating all the cookies and candy I can handle in four weeks which satisfies my desire for sweets until the next year’s December. Our winters have been warmer, with less snow, than in my childhood when I was bundled up in my snow suit – like Randy in A Christmas Story – building an igloo out of a snowdrift with the other neighborhood kids, and ice skating on the rink my dad made in the back yard. Kids and adults came from all around to skate on that rink. The forecast for Christmas Day in central Iowa is 59 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny, so there’s little hope for ice skating.

In addition to indulging in cookies, candy, and basically everything else, I watch as many Christmas movies as possible. A Christmas Carol (1938, 1951, 1970, 1984, and the very twisted version from 2019), Christmas in Connecticut (1945), The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), The Shop Around the Corner (1940, later remade as You’ve Got Mail), The Bishop’s Wife (1947), Remember the Night (1940) featuring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray who would later generate more onscreen steam in Double Indemnity (1944), and Holiday Inn (1942), the precursor to White Christmas (1954). I’ve seen all these movies many times, but I usually pick up something new each time.

This year, however, I’ve watched and rewatched them more than usual, even with hokey plots like figuring out how to help a retired Army general save his failing inn by putting on a Broadway-style variety show (White Christmas). These movies provide and temporary refuge from what is happening in our world: brown people being abducted off streets, in schools, at work, and at home simply because they are brown; the partial destruction of the People’s House; the renaming of a building that honors an assassinated president; the suppression of free speech that the current administration finds inconvenient or uncomfortable; women’s rights being rolled back to the 1950s – or earlier – the sex trafficking of young girls by rich and powerful men; an HHS secretary who ignores science and puts people at risk; and, gerrymandering in several states designed to keep politicians remain in power. There’s more, and all of it is deeply disturbing.

As artists, we must speak up and speak out — invoking our First Amendment right to free speech to directly challenge and dismantle deliberate efforts to erase and rewrite history.

In this issue, we feature: the stunning and award winning photography of Roger Camp; “Radiant Drift,” fiction by Sally Cunningham; “Two Supplicants in the Queen City,” nonfiction by Emily Alice Katz; and, “Night Migration,” “Small Margins,” “Opposition,” “Amaranthine,” and “Watching the Bald Eagle Live Nest Cam,” a poetry portfolio by Julie Shulman. The Mud Season Review team hopes you’ll share our excitement about our 80th issue.

As always, we appreciate our readers and the artists who submit their work to us. Our jobs are challenging because of the high caliber of work we receive, but we consider that challenge a privilege.

Best wishes for 2026,

Suzanne Guess, MFA, Editor in Chief