This Issue

Nov/Dec 2009

We start out as cute, wrinkly babies and, if we're lucky, we age into wise and wrinkly old people. Acorns sprout and grow into majestic oaks. Fuzzy caterpillars encase themselves in chrysalises and emerge as butterflies. We all grow and change: we undergo transformation.

Writers are artists who take life, especially the hard facts of life, and transform them into something "rich and strange." Listen! Do you hear Ariel's song floating on the wind?

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! Now I hear them--Ding-dong bell.

William Shakespeare transformed the stage into an enchanted island realm in his play The Tempest. In this issue author Jessica Jenkinson takes a simple roadside flower and transforms it into a thrilling adventure story. Read her Expressions, and you'll never look at Queen Anne's lace the same way again. Poet Brendan O'Brien possesses an irrepressible joie de vivre that makes him long to live again and again, slipping eel-like down every avenue of human experience, while Grace Peterson's protagonist, on a FastWeb scholarship hunt, just wishes she could click yes to every offbeat criterion that brings in money: duck calling anyone?

When you're done reading the following selections from CICADA®, go to www.cicadamag.com/submitwork and answer the Call for Creative Endeavors. Your Challenge theme: Transformation!