Welcome to the second issue of Waccamaw, an online literary journal published at Coastal Carolina University.

We take our name from the Waccamaw River, which runs through Conway, South Carolina, home of the university. We publish two issues per year, spring and fall, featuring the best contemporary poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction we can find.

Our aim is to publish essays, stories, and poems as beautiful and mysterious as the tannin-dyed black water of the river whose name we invoke. We value mystery in literature, but not obscurity, remembering Robert Frost’s profound observation, “There is nothing as mysterious as something clearly seen.” In the preparation of our first two issues (spring and fall 2008), we have sought work that is at once clear and mysterious—poems, stories, and essays that speak to anyone with a direct clarity, but which also reveal levels of meaning, complexity, and ambiguity with each subsequent reading.

Our second issue was launched October 31, 2008: the 213th anniversary of John Keats’s birth. In Waccamaw No. 2, you will find new poems, stories, and essays by David Kirby, Sonny Brewer, Rebecca Barry, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Wilson, Robin Ekiss, Kyle Minor, Judith Kitchen, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Laura Valeri, Brian Turner, and many other accomplished and emerging authors.

With this issue, we welcome Joe Oestreich to our editorial staff as Nonfiction Editor. Joe’s essay “Simpatico” appeared in our first issue last spring, and he joined the Coastal Carolina University faculty this fall.

We are also happy to announce that we will begin accepting unsolicited submissions for our third issue beginning in January. Interested authors should consult our submission guidelines. Please note that we will only accept submissions online.

Finally, we are proud to note that Waccamaw is now a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.

Thank you for your interest in our journal. We hope you will find the literary work we’re presenting to be as essential and mysterious as the water that has flowed through Conway since long before the place was given that name. Welcome, once again, to Waccamaw.