About this issue
The Expanded Pandemic Edition of San Antonio Review (Volume 3, Summer 2020) captures a world in upheaval through poetry, prose, essays, and visual art created in the shadow of COVID-19. This issue gathers voices wrestling with isolation, loss, resilience, and renewal, while also celebrating creativity as a vital response to crisis. From striking verse and intimate short stories to provocative essays and arresting art, it stands as a document of both its moment and the enduring power of literature to make meaning amid uncertainty.
editor’s note
There’s too much to say.
I’m working on a much longer piece to include as our next issue’s introductory note that expands upon the tardiness of this edition reaching your hands. You’ve waited long enough, though. So, I’ll stick to the facts:
I founded San Antonio Review during a psychopharmaceutical- and environment-induced boredom while living in San Antonio in 2017. Thus, the name. In mid-2018, my wife, four dogs and parrot and I moved back to Austin. I considered renaming the journal, but was…Read More
art
fiction
Getting it Down
An essay in two parts: the first, written by my friend Ken, is about me. The second, written by me after he died, is about him. Anna at Four Years of Ageby Ken EllysonSpectrum, 1978 “She was a little bright wave of willfulness, so abandoned…
Remember Goliad
The wind is subtle. I imagine her whisper as I stand alone in Goliad Plaza. I remember the press of her hand against my chest after we danced. We trusted each other a little more each second as people watched her spin again and again…
Treehouse
I look at the ten-inch bolts I just purchased. They are heavy, rust resistant steel rods with a screw end with octagonal nuts and a square head on the other end. I wonder if they are strong enough to hold the four by four posts…
Three Steaks and You’re Out
On their way to Peter Luger Steak House, with its juicy tenderloins and creamed spinach so rich it can stop your heart, Eyal and Kobe, handsome young men still on Tel Aviv time, take in the lights of lower Manhattan. They’re with Eyal’s gray-haired friend…
Kings in Exile
My folks sent me away to live with my Aunt Charlene and Uncle Bud in eastern Colorado the summer of 1969, praying I’d come back a reformed boy. I’d gotten into trouble at home, and my old man figured some hard time in corn country…
nonfiction
2019 Birthday Lecture: The Countercultural Vision of History
Ishmael Reed is back in the news these days. The writer, now eighty-one years old, got national attention for his latest play, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda. Most of the headlines of pieces on the play are some variation of “Ishmael Reed Does Not Like…
My Knees, Anthony Bourdain and Depression
As I dragged my family around the country from one academic job to another, No Reservations, Bourdain’s culinary travel-and-adventure series was a constant — a comforting event once a week in our hectic lives. I developed a weekly ritual of experimenting with popcorn toppings inspired by…
Children
My daughter has my hurt in her. She lives with it better than I have. I hid it, softened it, made it acceptable, and then called my compromise a success. An achievement of normal. She faces it, endures it, mocks it by parody, dismissal, lightness.…
A Team of Mules
My grandad’s father John Speed Stephens Jr. was the son of an Irish immigrant, and as a fourteen-year-old, he became the pioneer who planted the Stephens in Indian territory, pre-Oklahoma. This is his story, passed on by my father, born in Palmer, Oklahoma. Many of…
Solidarity
Martin Luther King, Jr., Black American, delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed labor discrimination. Malcolm X, Black American, was assassinated on February 21, 1965, receiving a total of 21 gunshot wounds. In 1965,…
The Mobbing of John R. Shillady
THE following account of the mobbing of John R. Shillady, Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, at Austin, Texas, August 22, 1919, by a County Judge, a constable and other Texas citizens, is submitted by the Association in response to…
Jaguar
As the artist-in-residence of Heartshare Human Services of New York, I design many collaborative projects to complete alongside adults with disabilities. This is in addition to creating my own work and overseeing workshop participants’ individual art projects. Sometimes I use my own pieces to inspire…
poetry
reviews
Book Review: WARBLES
Having put aside my recent readings inquiring into the goals of white supremacists, the connections between free-market right-wingers and Bitcoin enthusiasts and the morality of markets to reread and comment upon Alex Z. Salinas’ debut book of poetry, WARBLES, I’m struck by the way his…
Book Review: “Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity”
In September 2019, I took a group of students to the annual Prairie Festival at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, as part of my effort to introduce them to some genuinely radical thinking regarding environmental sustainability, local food systems, and the cultural shifts necessary…
Book Review: “White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America”
Margaret Hagerman spent years in the wilds of privileged white America, talking with kids, going to their soccer games, etc. in order to produce White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America. Working in the Midwestern burg of “Peterfield” (one suspects Minneapolis…
Book Review: “An Accident of Blood”
Margaret Hagerman spent years in the wilds of privileged white America, talking with kids, going to their soccer games, etc. in order to produce White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America. Working in the Midwestern burg of “Peterfield” (one suspects Minneapolis…
interviews
Interview with John Whitbourn
The author of A Dangerous Energy expands upon his outlook, methods and future works.