Growing Pains
Photograph by Pamela Rytter
A note from Editor-In-Chief Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice
Summer is BBQs and beers. It’s vacations and your neighbor one-upping you with her 4th of July American flag bunting. It’s also a time of beginnings and ends, of camps, homesickness, awkward kisses, and middle school pool parties involving (see-through) yellow bikinis.
OK, maybe that last one was just me.
Summer is growing pains with better weather.
Growing pains small: Will Karen invite me to her pool party? Does Karen even know my name?
Growing pains big: What is collusion? Am I the only one descending into an obscenity-laced road rage fit at the mere sight of a Trump bumper sticker?
Lately there has been a great deal of internet chit-chat about what it means to be a writer (Write everyday? Write once a day but twice on Sundays? Write in a handstand? In the shower?) and whether lit mags should pay (in an ideal world, yes). This should come as no surprise that everyone has an opinion.
The problem with opinions? It’s always black and white. Your opinion on one side. Mine on the other. Opinions? They don’t allow for the gray.
Here at Split Lip, we’re spending the summer in the gray. We’re blurring boundaries, taking one thing and transforming it into another. We’re learning to be comfortable in the unknown.
This month we’re fortunate to have boundary-busting work from Ryan Clark and Kristine Langley Mahler. Meghan Phillips reminds us that middle school is the best and the worst of times. Melissa Goode and Erin Striff take us poolside, where summer can be oh so very good and oh so very cruel.
Finally, please help me say goodbye* to Jon Chaiim McConnell, Split Lip’s longtime fiction editor, who is leaving us after 3+ years of serving up fabulous short fiction and growing the FAM. We wish Jon the best of luck. Once part of the FAM, always part of the FAM.
Sit back and relax. Pour a drink (or three). Turn off the news. Twitter. Your HGTV habit. Your summer reading begins right now.
—KAR
*PS – Amy Rossi talks with Jon Chaiim McConnell about looking back and forward on the blog here.
Pamela Rytter is a photographer living in New York City. Pamela specializes in event and portrait photography, and loves to tell a tale through pictures. Pamela’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Martha Stewart Weddings, and Matthew Robbins Design. She has photographed Conan O’Brien, Vera Wang, and other famous faces, but her favorite subjects to photograph are her children.