Button reads: "Peep Inside"
2024 Passager Winter Issue cover

Soft cover | 164 pages | $15
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This issue features memoir, poetry and fiction by 30 writers from around the US and Canada. It begins with Lori Levy’s poem in a taverna in Rhodes (“All It Took Was a Flower in Rhodes”) and ends with a poem by 93-year-old Jaque Reed, “Rivers Are Forever,” where the speaker observes a boat that

putters ahead
into yesterday


while

half-submerged roots of ancient
fallen trees make filigreed gates
into the future.

And while we know that most people don’t read journals from beginning to end, we like to imagine a reader who does — and then create an experience for them. What is the first sound the journal makes? What is the last? 

Contributors

Poetry:

Lana Ayers
New Progressive Lenses

Sue Budin
Detritus

Cheryl Corey
Falling Star

David Galloway
Samagrelo

Olive Kohl Giese
The Melody Lingers On

Tim Gillespie
Great Aunt Maggie

Bill Hollands
How the Conversation Might Have Gone Instead

Susan Carroll Jewell
A Bucket in the Woods

Nikia Leopold
Fires

Lori Levy
All It Took Was a Flower in Rhodes

James Littwin
Pearl

Kerry Rawlinson
The Snow on Rocks

Jaque Reed
Rivers are Forever

Linda Goodman Robiner
Notes to Myself

Annette M. Sisson
Threadbare

Gary Stein
Chance

Jim Tilley
Writing My Obituary

Fiction:

Ellie Anderson
Waiting for the Light

Ruth Dandrea
Yellow

Denisha Naidoo
The Old Woman and the Cottage

James O’Sullivan
Plum Trees

John Picard
Rightsizing

Michael Pikna
Just a Moment

Memoir:

Anne Anthony
Drowning in a Bowl of Alphabet Soup

Eugene Jones Baldwin
The Trail of Tears

Etta Brandt
What Is This Thing Called Love?

Richard Frank Gillum
From Graveyard to Schoolyard

Margarita Meyendorff
Script in Hand

Dian Parker
The Vanished

Parul Shah
Inheritance

Masthead

Mary Azrael, Kendra Kopelke, editors. Rosanne Singer, assistant editor. Christine Drawl, managing editor, art director & design. Karen Bashkirew, Stephen Hollaway, Laurie Pfister, guest readers. Amber Campbell-Wheeler, Sarah Rubin, interns. Diane Dunn, cover painting.

Recordings

Contributors from this issue read their poems, essays and stories. The reading was followed by a conversation about how poems are born, “failed work,” and rediscovering your voice after 50. Featuring cover artist Diane Dunn. Recorded April 28, 2024.