With such sincerity, an immense thank you to our Guest Selecting Editor, Matt Bell, who has been promoting the words of others incessantly, while at the same time contributing his own passion for the written word with such a beautiful love for creating and sharing. What he does for this world of reading and writing is surreal and uncanny. And with such sincerity, truly, thank you to the readers and associate editors of the 2020 Wigleaf Top 50: Casey Hannan, Elaine Chiew, Michelle Dove, Alex Perez, Aleyna Rentz, Anne Weisgerber, Savannah Slone, Kara Vernor, Sean Lovelace, and xTx. The time, effort, and thought they put into this is purely for the love of being a part of the literary community and it is inspiring and greatly appreciated. This endeavor really couldn't have been undertaken without their passion to keep this form of writing thriving. Thanks to the previous series editor, Marcelle Heath, for helping me with the transition, as I learned so much from her. And of course, many thanks to Scott Garson for his guidance and his continued dedication to very short fiction.

Having been a reader, associate series editor and now series editor for The Wigleaf Top 50, each and every year has been an amazing experience for many reasons. One being that short fiction re-energizes itself each year through the vitality of both wonderful writers and journals. It is a living being in itself, sustained by the creativity, passion, and thrill ignited by writers and editors who seek to promote the short prose form. The imagination, the sorrow, the love, the relationships, the families, friends, the jobs, the life experiences and all it entails—to be created within a span of 1000 words, to represent all that we go through in one way or another—shows our need to connect and relate to one another, word by word in roughly three pages or less. A need so sought for, we toil and ponder and scratch out, rewrite, revise, draft, and smile and cry, and laugh to express the world in just a glimpse. Why? We might have various reasons as to why, but I believe a common factor, in all of us, is that we have a story to tell, and we have readers who want to listen. And it continues to grow.

Onward we go.

—shome dasgupta

Shome Dasgupta's most recent books are PRETEND I AM SOMEONE YOU LIKE, a novel, and MUTE, a collection of stories. He lives in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Robert Couse-Baker.


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