Allison Joseph on Cor's INK ISSUE.
- Keith Hoerner
- Dec 18, 2025
- 2 min read
A running joke that I have with my students is that I'm not vain about many things, but I am absolutely vain about my handwriting. As a child growing up in the Bronx, I learned calligraphy in public school art class. My father, a proud Caribbean man from the island of Grenada, was equally proud of his handwriting—he had the kind of signature you'd find on money—ornate, full of flourishes and curlicues. Like my father, I loved signing my name, practicing the loops of the letter L, the humps of the letter N.
For me, ink and poetry and writing are intimately linked. As a teenager, I filled pages and pages of notebooks with poems, play scenes, and random squiggles. There's something about pen and paper that I cling to still—I still begin my poems mostly on paper, in notebooks that I've bought for the express purpose that poems might find their way onto the blank pages. In this world of AI and bitcoin and digital signatures, I still believe in the alchemy of ink.
But that's me. As we present another curated collection of poetry, prose, book reviews and interviews in this issue of Crab Orchard Review, we as editors had no notion if these pieces started in ink or on a screen, on a laptop or in a finely-wrought leather journal. What matters, in the end, is that however these pieces got from each author's mind to our pages, that you, our readers, find herein compelling voices from new and established authors.
This edition features an interview with poet and firefighter Jonathan Travelstead, who is also a penturner. What's that, you ask? Jonathan not only saves lives and writes poems, he also makes pens. This is the ultimate power play for a writer--making the very tool that makes writing itself possible. His pens are as finely crafted as his poems.
One of my favorite pictures of Jon Tribble, Crab Orchard Review's late and dearly missed managing editor, is a candid snapshot of Jon in the aisles of our local Staples, deep in thought about which box of pens to purchase. Jon, who was also my husband, was as pen-crazy as I am, but nowhere near as vain about his handwriting. He thought his script looked awkward and boxy, and very rarely began his poems in ink. He would carry the text of a poem in his head for months, and when he was ready, he would type the poem on whatever computer was nearby. Later in life, he'd compose poems on his phone screen, much like my undergraduate students do in my classes.
However you get your writing onto the page, we hope you enjoy the creative works we've assembled for this issue. We strive at Crab Orchard Review to be a magazine that readers enjoy and writers admire, so whether you're a writer, a reader, or both, we hope that you find the work in this issue to be work that stays with you, indelibly as ink on skin.
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