Letter from the Editor Fall 2026

Autumn has a way of making change visible. What was once green becomes gold, the familiar landscape shifts, and the passing of time announces itself in color and light. Yet there is no simple ending here. The world is rearranging itself, revealing patterns that were difficult to see before. Literature offers a similar invitation: to look again, to reconsider what we thought we knew, and to discover the unexpected possibilities waiting within the ordinary.

As BlazeVOX continues its 25th-anniversary year, this fall issue brings together an expansive gathering of voices, forms, and ways of seeing. Poetry moves alongside fiction, literary nonfiction, visual poetry, and text art, each opening a different passage into the world. These works remind us that language is not a fixed instrument but a living practice, capable of changing direction, disrupting expectation, and making room for experiences that resist easy explanation. After twenty-five years, I remain convinced that the most interesting work often begins where certainty ends.

We live in a time when so much of our attention is claimed, divided, and hurried toward an answer. The works collected here offer another kind of encounter. They ask us to pause, to follow an image or an idea beyond its apparent destination, and to accept the productive uncertainty of not knowing exactly where we are going. A poem may alter the scale of a moment; a story may loosen the boundaries between memory and invention; an arrangement of words on a page may make us see language itself anew. Such encounters do not require us to agree, only to remain attentive. In that attention, something opens.

For twenty-five years, BlazeVOX has been a home for this spirit of exploration, publishing work that takes chances and welcomes the strange, the difficult, the playful, and the unclassifiable. The journal continues because writers continue to find new ways to speak, and because readers remain willing to meet those voices with curiosity. I am grateful to every contributor who has trusted us with their work and to every reader who has joined us in this ongoing adventure.

As the season turns, may these pages offer a little space to linger, to wonder, and to see the world differently. There is always more to discover in language, and always another voice waiting to be heard.

Geoffrey Gatza
Editor, BlazeVOX [books]