Boat house.

SHARK REEF’s fall edition, its fifteenth issue, is online now at sharkreef.org. When the literary magazine was launched in June of 2001, it was seen by its Lopez Island founders as a new millenium online zine from a rural grassroots community, a place where serious local writers might see their work in print. Over the years, SHARK REEF has published the work of eighty-four writers and fifteen visual artists. Most of them live in the islands; some are visitors who, perhaps, wish they lived here.

The fall issue features fiction from Stephen Adams and Rita Larom; memoir from Barbara Lewis, Alie Smaalders and Julie Van Camp; and poetry from Maya Borhani, Eleanor Burke, Meredith Griffith, David Huddle, Jill McCabe Johnson, Elizabeth Landrum, Kim Secunda, Susan Slapin and Paul S. Walsh. Featured visual artist is Jeff Otis of Orcas.

Adams, Larom, Smaalders, Van Camp, Borhani, Burke and Landrum are from Lopez Island. Griffith, Johnson, Lewis, Secunda and Slapin are from Orcas Island. Paul Walsh is from San Juan Island while David Huddle lives in Vermont and visits the islands.

“The poetry in this issue is especially wonderful,” says editor Lorna Reese. “From Maya Borhani’s elegiac reverie on net worth to Eleanor Burke’s elegant and elliptical look at life on the farm to Kim Secunda’s self-assured modern epic, there are new perspectives on how we live and what’s important to us today. Such riches!”

Reese founded the magazine in 2001 with Alie Smaalders, Laurie Parker and Leta Marshall under the auspices of the Lopez Writers Guild and works with a different co-editor on each edition. Go to sharkreef.org to find the current offerings and archived issues. Interviews with Lopez writers can be found at kloi.org, Lopez Island’s low power FM station. Check the archives for Lopez Writers Read programs.

SHARK REEF publishes two issues a year, one in the spring and one in the fall. Submission deadlines are June 30 and December 31. The magazine considers solicited and unsolicited material, published previously or unpublished; fiction, non-fiction prose, poetry and dramatic writing. It also features artwork by visual artists in each issue as well. Anyone living in the islands or who has visited is eligible to submit.