Dear Readers,

What makes a piece of writing an Under Review piece? 

I asked myself this before I started reviewing submissions for this issue. It was meant to be a sort of recalibration of my inner scale and a focused pause before cannonballing into the always fast, sometimes choppy, waters of issue production. I should tell you that we have no formal rubric for evaluating the work we receive,  no consistent scoring system or formula. I like it that way; I think  Meghan and Terry do, too. We end up discussing many works at length. We take second looks, sometimes third looks, and make cases for the pieces we  enthusiastically want. Sometimes we’re able to articulate exactly what we love (or don’t love) about a piece, and other times the pull is more alchemical: a piece works for us because of what it is in total and what it becomes when it filters through our sensibilities as readers. 

(This is a good moment to remind all of us writers  [including myself here; I’m a writer, too]  just how subjective the process of evaluating work for publication is, how imprecise and hinged on the non-sciences of human taste and mood it can be, even when there is a scoring system involved. Our job is not to write to the system. Our job is to keep creating and submitting good work, ok?)

When I am considering a piece for the Under Review, I want to be surprised  by what the writer did with the subject or an aspect of craft. I want to be so astonished by a line I’ve just read that I let fly an audible cuss in the middle of my small-town coffee shop. I want to be delighted; I want to marvel. I want to feel like doing what the players on the bench do when they see their teammate hit a big three. I want to howl and wave some towels. 

That is what I want from sports now, too, as many of us spectators do. We want the feeling of witnessing something humanly incredible. We hear the sound it pulls out of our mouths—no, our souls!—the shriek,  gasp, groan, bellow; we can stop being so tame for a minute. The moment moves us and we want to be moved. The feat of athleticism, the improbable outcome pulls our rears out of our seats and into the air, releasing us temporarily from gravity and inertia and everything else that holds us in place. We are up, we are up!  And then, sometimes, we are thrown back down. I love those moments, too—in sports and in literature. I joke with Meghan and Terry that I like only the darkest short stories, but that’s only half untrue. Triumph stirs something in us, but pain and loss and menace do, too. 

Issue 10 is full of moments that I hope will surprise and delight and move you, physically or otherwise. The work in this issue meditates on risk and the pursuit of transcendence, on the ways we push ourselves and try to reckon with our vulnerabilities. The concept of freedom appears in this issue in varying forms, as do hero figures, of sport and beyond. 

How fun, how fitting that Issue 10 is launching during the culminating matches of EURO 2024, the Copa América, and Wimbledon, in the middle of the Pamplona encierro and Le Tour, just after the T20 World Cup, and just ahead of the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad. Amidst all this vigorous international athletic competition, how fun and how fitting that our Issue 10 contributors hail from all over the place, including Naarm, Toronto, and Brooklyn; Kelowna, Canberra, KC, and the Carolinas.

This is Issue 10, Dear Reader. 10! That is no small number for a  journal launched solely on the creative juice, literary rizz, and love of sport of our founding editors. Ten issues is not a small body of work, and we have our contributors to thank for that.  We are lucky—and grateful—to have a community of writers that is eager to keep trying to answer “What makes a piece of writing an Under Review piece?” with the beauty and bravery of their work.

Carlee Tressel

fiction editor

CARLEE TRESSEL is a player, watcher, daughter, and writer of sports. When she worked a campus job at a desk next to Meghan, little did she know she was trying out for a spot on her own personal sports lit Dream Team. Several years and creative projects later—including a book about the GOAT of the cold-rolled steel industry—she is honored to be the newest editor for the Under Review. Alongside her bookish bachelor farmer, Carlee writes and raises corn & kids in rural Indiana.