I received my contributor’s copies of Silk Road Issue 4 today. The journal is a publication of Pacific University, where I recently completed my MFA, and bills itself as “a journal of place.” This issue is bursting with tales from Minnesota, Kentucky, and Africa, and poems from the Deep South, Provence, and Mt. Fuji. My poem, entitled “How Can a Boy Hate Fishing?,” touches on the landscape of my childhood in the Imperial Valley–a desert farming community on the U.S.-Mexico border. The publication is beautifully done, and I look forward to perusing the stories and poems with interest.