Volume 11 of the Delmarva Reviewwas published in November and is featured on Harold Wilson’s program, Delmarva Today: Writer’s Edition. Wilson’s guests are the Executive Editor of the Review, Wilson Wyatt and the Review’s poetry editor Anne Colwell. Wilson Wyatt was a one of the founders of the review. He was a journalist and the head of communications at three corporations. More recently, Wyatt served on the board of the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. Anne Colwell is an English professor at the University of Delaware. Anne has published two books of poetry and won an award for her novel Holy Day. Anne is a master writer and along with Wilson has appeared on Delmarva Today: Writer’s Edition a number of times.
The program is in two parts: first is a discussion of the new Delmarva Review with Anne and Wilson and the second is a dramatic reading of one of the Review’s fiction pieces, “Prairie Fever” by Emily Rae Roberts and read by Madeleine Slater. As an added feature, the Review recently had a reading at the Writer’s Center and we’re fortunate to be able to share the poem “Responsibility” read by the author Holly Karapetkove, and a short fiction pieces by Caroline Beck, “The Secret Life of Pool Cleaners.”
Prairie fever affected many European settlers and others from the east during the migration and settling of the west and particularly the Great Planes in the nineteenth century. Used to urban settings, some of these homesteaders found the vast emptiness of the planes, the harsh and almost constant wind, the bleak winters, and particularly the isolation literally maddening.
Emily Roberts’ story captures the essence of prairie fever in a surprising setting. It is a powerful piece, read by Madeleine Slater with skill and feeling.
