December 16, 2025 - Covers of Curlew Past

Dear Readers,

As I put together the collage you look at now, in preparation for our Issue 10 cover reveal, I reflect fondly on all the amazing work Curlew New York has featured over the last (almost) decade. It is unbelievable, and yet completely believable, that nine years and nine issues have passed since Jordan, our founder, started Curlew.

It was in 2020 that I came across a fateful Craigslist call for submissions and, without overthinking it (incredibly rare for me), I sent in a piece I had just written a few weeks prior titled “Florabama”. When Jordan accepted the piece he gave me not only my first publication, but my first paid publication, and with that came a sense of legitimacy that I deeply craved. That direct link to my work, and subsequent honorarium, proved something to myself, and anyone else I thought might be paying attention — I was a writer. 

While I will feel forever grateful to Jordan, and Curlew, for giving me that sense of validity and pride, I am happy to have a different perspective now, verging on six years later. During these years I have continued to read, write, grow, fail, succeed, laugh, cry, search and find. Less focused on proof, I feel more certain than ever of one fact — I am a writer. 

It has less to do with legitimacy than it did before. Really, it has less to do with anyone but myself than it did before. I still strive for success, but success means something different now. It means being happy, it means doing something I love, it means being with people I love. I feel successful when I finish reading a book that I know will stick with me long past its last page, I feel successful when I write something I like the sound of, I feel successful when I have bursts of inspiration from the world around me, I feel successful when I challenge myself and learn I can do something I’d never thought was possible. Six years, nine years, time stretches on and all it really does is teach us. 

I wrote “Florabama” in the backseat of my friend’s car while we drove through the Florida panhandle. I came back to Brooklyn after that trip and never stopped thinking about it. I loved the emerald ocean, I loved the Spanish moss, I loved the never ending roads and the dinosaurs that swam in the swamps on either side. I dreamt about it for five years, am dreaming about it still, will dream about it tonight when I go to bed, when I lay down in the room my friend made up for me in preparation for a visit that has no end date. The alligator from my dreams swims in the pond behind her house and I am here now, somewhere I already was, somewhere I knew I would be. 

It feels wonderfully cyclical to be reflecting on my start with Curlew, now writing from the place that inspired the piece of writing first published by Curlew. It reminds me that time works mysteriously, that life is unpredictable in the best and worst ways and that we need to have some malleability, leniency and hope.

Any lack of consistency on Curlew’s behalf has not been for lack of passion, but maybe from lack of stability, lack of certainty, something we are still searching for and hope to gain for ourselves, our readers and for the literary community that we feel so thankful to be a part of. 

With Issue 10 we celebrate another publication filled with work from passionate, talented artists. We continue to seek out words and images that move us, continue to honor our contributors and thank our readers. Our shared dedication and love of literature, the arts, and self-expression will carry us into Curlew’s next chapter – whatever that may be, wherever it may go.

– Elizabeth Lerman, Fiction & Prose Editor at Curlew New York