2013. The year of poetry and graphic art. As mornings grow lighter and our clocks are ready to spring forward and dash ahead into summer the editors at the Owen Wister are looking back on our submissions. Moving into a new era, the digital age, poetry and graphic art have become popular submission in the time of Twitter, Imgur, and other social media shaping generational tendencies. Fiction still popular, though, as the power of story remains strong in our western narrative veins—we all have a story, a verbal picture of our existence. How does the Owen Wister move into the next season, move into the next age of quickisms, and keep true to the idea of the Old West? What does the frontier mean in a time that is the frontier, the cutting edge? Thumbing through submissions and reading some of the vivid language and visual images, we realize we are beyond the new frontier and into a new realm of unanswered questions, unwritten stories, and images yet to be portrayed. And so we capture the year 2013, Wyoming, the west, in the Owen Wister and move beyond the frontier, into places yet to be named.
~ Jen, Assistant Editor
