Issue L2026 Editors’ Note

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” — Heraclitus

For the past three decades, The New River Journal has been a front-runner in the complex evolution of electronic literature and digital art. We have thrived on publishing experimental, boundary-pushing works as they’ve emerged from an ever-changing digital landscape. With the publication of the 50th issue, we have decided to broaden our scope to include fiction and poetry alongside electronic literature. Since The New River Journal is housed in Virginia Tech’s Creative Writing MFA program, where our editors study fiction and poetry, it feels right to open our doors to these two genres.

Fiction

Our fiction explores off-shoot themes of existentialism. In T.L. Tomljanovic’s “The Planetarium Used to Be My Favorite Place,” a bride-to-be, who’d rather be at Olive Garden than her wedding rehearsal, reflects on happier days at the local planetarium. Franziska Hofhansel’s story, “Freudian Flower,” blooms with fun, psychedelic imagery as a flower named Steve attempts photosynthetic therapy. C. Show’s “Guilty” presents a social horror tale about a car breakdown on a midnight Texas highway.

Poetry

Our poetry folios move through grief, both personal and ecological. Sean Bugg writes queer longing, intimacy, and mortality through the body. In Ansel Elkin’s poems, the body, the land, and the afterlife speak to one another, where the past hums, the present trembles, and the atemporality of sorrow is remade as music. Otxamba Quérrimo’s poems revolve around the human impact on our environments and how such impacts return to us for better or worse.

Electronic Literature & Digital Art

Our electronic literature pieces highlight the intersection of place and politics through a variety of forms. “Open Season” by Halim Madi is a piece of computational theater that takes users through three acts, exposing the deceptive self-deportation CBP Home app used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In “nothing happens,” a game inspired by the April 2025 Portuguese power outage, Terhi Marttila invites users to explore a domestic space without electricity. “Mystery Fragments” by Owen Roberts is an endless, existential animation featuring a dog and a cat who discuss the mysterious disappearance of the household’s human members. In “36 Views of the Sea” by Katy Gero, a pair of interactive poems anagramed from Etel Adnan’s collection Sea and Fog emulate the recursive nature of writing and language as reconfigurations of already-existing materials. “Parched” by Miharu Yano is an audio-visual poem that harnesses language from the bouldering and rock climbing communities to highlight issues of consent and power dynamics. “Radical Atmospheres,” a piece by Andrew Demirjian and Hunter College students, is an audio AR app and ongoing archival project that maps the sounds of the history and politics of East Harlem.

Collaborative Refraction

We are introducing another new section we call “Collaborative Refraction” where a work of poetry or fiction is rendered into electronic literature. In this issue, you will find the result of a collaboration between Abu Bakr Sadiq, a poet from Nigeria, and Leonardo Flores, an e-lit scholar. In “Memory Demands Space,” Sadiq and Flores craft a solemn visual experience that portrays the fleetingness of memory and the expansion and contraction of space. With this collaboration, we hope to expand the ways by which a single work of literature can be experienced.

It has been a privilege to serve as editors for The New River Journal, especially for this landmark 50th issue. A frequent undertaking for the editors of this journal is to review the archives. Every time we carry out this task, the results manage to surprise, stimulate, challenge, and bamboozle us anew. We hope that the pieces assembled here can join in that proud tradition.

Spring 2026 Editors 

Makenzie Anderson, Kas Armstrong, Ayla Elam, Lauren Emo, Karan Kapoor, Lexi Kessens, Isaac Maxey, Maria Psarakis, Nurain Ọládèjì, Josh Ward

Fall 2025 Editors 

Makenzie Anderson, Kas Armstrong, Lauren Emo, Dylan Ever, Piper Fitzgerald, Lexi Kessens, Dana Muñoz, Nurain Ọládèjì, Riley O’Mearns, Kirk Reilly, William Shaw, Josh Ward

Learn more about the journal and our editorial process by tuning into The New River Podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.