Floodwall Magazine

Spring 2021

From the Editors

Spring 2021 Print Issue

Our student-run, campus literary magazine takes its name from a landmark known well to the community of Grand Forks—the system of floodwalls and levees that line the Red River of the North. The floodwalls offer resilience, hope, and shelter. It’s our deep hope that these pages offer something similar for our dynamic creative community at the University of North Dakota.

This issue of Floodwall shelters a more expansive, magical community of texts than ever before. Terrestrial dreamers watch the night sky for possibilities. Gardens and lawns become sanctuaries and wildernesses. A meditation on the video game Outer Wilds probes the ethics of exploring the cosmos. In our first-ever publication of a play, a pair of gamblers watch a horse race with fatal complications. A painting of downtown Grand Forks renders a construction scene with beauty and grace. And our first-ever themed section on “Growth” collects poetry, fiction, photography, and art that invite us to explore growth as a natural and spiritual process, rooted in the wilderness and the soul.

We’d like to thank all of the poets, storytellers, essayists, photographers, and artists who submitted work for consideration in this issue. Without you and your creativity, there would be no Floodwall. We’re grateful to you for your boldness and your courage, and we’re honored to have had the privilege of reading your work. Your brilliance as artists is one of the most beautiful parts of our campus. Keep making, keep creating. We believe in you.

We’d like to congratulate all of our contributors to this issue, as well as the winners of this year’s creative writing scholarship competitions—Michaela Oosthuizen for the Thomas McGrath Award in Poetry and Keely McLean for the John Little Fiction Scholarship. Congratulations, as well, to the runners-up for this year’s awards—Casey Fuller and Charles Henry for the McGrath Award, and Parker Stenseth for the Little Scholarship.

We’d also like to thank our editors, our volunteer readers, and the students in this semester’s ENGL 234 course for their hard work this semester in evaluating over 100 submissions to curate this dazzling display of creativity. We’d also like to thank our copyeditors for their sharp-eyed attention to detail.

Thank you, as well, to the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences for their support over this past year. Thank you, as well, to the UND Writing Center, where many of our copyeditors and volunteer readers work.

We couldn’t have done it without all of you. And we hope, at the end of this long year, that this issue of Floodwall brings you some much-deserved joy.