Bramble Winter Spring 2025 print issue will be available soon.

Editor’s Note

In fiction, we are free to tell the sorts of truth that details can get in the way of. In truth, we sometimes find our intentions and emotions are eaten away by the circumstances of how things occur. In search of this, we find love and pain, growth and loss. When we let ourselves focus on what truly is before us, we can see the lines in a face that love as strong as the winds that grind into stone, or hands more used to the work of a wrench than wrapping around loved ones. It is the truth of our lives that leads us to open ourselves to love as if feeling it for the first time, or to fall into the arms of loved ones, and those surrounding them as they pass on.

This issue of Bramble is a collection of these stories, these snapshots of time, moments, experiences ready to evaporate, to be ground up by the eternal churn of our lives, contained with crystal clarity for all to see. Humans are made to share experiences. We touch, and love, we weep and fight.

I will be forever grateful for having the opportunity to connect to the work of these amazing authors and share the ones that will forever live within the hallways of my mind.

Esteban Colon
March 2025

Esteban Colon is an experiential educator and a Kenosha Poet Laureate Emeritus (2018-2019). A co-founder of The Waiting 4 the Bus Poetry Collective, he has co-hosted, organized and performed in a variety of poetry open mics and showcases along with workshops and even stranger poetry events. His work has found print in a variety of anthologies (including but not limited to: Revise the Psalm, works inspired by the writing of Gwendolyn Brooks; Prairie Gold, An Anthology of the American Heartland; and Nuclear Impact, Broken Atoms in our Hands ) and journals (including but not limited to Rhino, After Hours, and Kweli).

Artist Bio

Alfred Stark has a BFA in Drawing from Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, and teaches Moku-Hanga at Shake Rag Alley in Mineral Point, The Clearing Folk School in Ellison Bay, and The Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. Find him at Alfred Stark | artist, birder, creating works on paper | Patreon.

Artist Statement

Cut from a solid board of poplar, this portrait block was used to create dozens of watercolor woodblock prints, all using the Japanese, Moku-hanga technique. It is a quiet, loving, depiction of ordinary life. Meaning “wood print,” this simple, centuries-old technique employs water-based ink, basic carving and rubbing tools, beautiful Japanese paper, and fine-grained wood.