Spring 2026 Issue: After Understanding

Interpretation, instinct, and the work of living with what exceeds explanation

This new issue of Broad Ripple Review begins in conversation. It unfolds not only between writers and readers, but also between texts, lives, and the versions of people we construct from fragments. Across this issue, we encounter a series of attempts to reach toward experience after it has already passed and after it has resisted easy explanation.

Travis D. Roberson’s “On Berlin, Lucia” opens in a mode of literary intimacy, where admiration and projection blur together. The speaker assembles Lucia Berlin through fragments of biography and text, circling the desire to know someone fully while acknowledging how much remains out of reach. What forms is not a complete portrait, but something more revealing, an understanding shaped as much by longing as by evidence.

That desire to make sense of the world narrows into something more immediate in Ella Torres’s “Flu Season,” where attention sharpens into vigilance. The narrator moves through daily life calculating distance, exposure, and risk, transforming ordinary interactions into sites of potential danger. Beneath that precision is a loss that continues to structure the present, and control becomes a way of living alongside uncertainty even when it cannot eliminate it.

At the center of the issue, Erin Blissett Williamson’s “Litany” stretches grief across time, repetition, and performance. Language returns to itself, revising and rehearsing the story of loss in an effort to stabilize it. Conversations are practiced, details are reshaped, and the boundary between private experience and public narration begins to blur. What emerges is not resolution, but the ongoing labor of trying to speak what refuses to settle.

That effort does not hold in Eleanor Polak’s “The Dinner Party,” where the structures that organize understanding begin to break down. What replaces them is not confusion, but something more immediate and more forceful. The body moves first, before meaning can follow, and what unfolds resists being translated back into explanation. The result is unsettling, but it is also clarifying in its refusal to be contained.

Gillian Gurley’s “Grief is a Quilt” turns toward a different kind of response, one that unfolds over time. Through the slow processes of dyeing, piecing, and stitching, experience is worked into something tangible. Meaning is not uncovered all at once, but is built gradually through attention and care. What remains is not resolution, but a form that can hold what persists.

Taken together, these pieces trace a range of responses to what exceeds understanding. We interpret, we control, we rehearse, we act, and we make. None of these approaches resolves the tension between experience and explanation, but each offers a way of continuing forward and of living within that space.

Thank you for reading Broad Ripple Review. We are honored to share this work and grateful to the writers who trusted us with pieces that are searching, precise, and unafraid of complexity.

If this issue resonates with you, we invite you to submit your own work. We are always looking for writing that is attentive in its language, deliberate in its structure, and willing to remain with what does not easily resolve.

With gratitude,
Kelly Schoenegge

Editor, Broad Ripple Review