Mushroom Rain

letter from the editor #1

thank you, lovely people

it has been my absolute pleasure over the last few months to read your submissions and to curate them into our first official issue.

it is one thing to write poems yourself. it is another to try to pull together one’s poems into a body of work. and it is an entirely other, entirely new-to-me thing to be entrusted with someone else’s writing.

editing has felt like a rare kind of intimacy. it’s like there is a particular kind of trust and vulnerability here. and I know that anyone who has submitted must already, to some level, be comfortable being vulnerable (a prerequisite perhaps to writing and certainly to submitting). and I know they know it might be published, they probably want it to be. in many ways, i am just a filter—a screen through which their work must pass—a barrier, even. but at the same time it’s like saying: okay, you can judge me. you, this singular person, can look at what I have made and decide whether it deserves a place.

all of that to say, this is not something that I have taken lightly. it has been a privilege and a joy to read and to understand you.

issue breakdown

the structure of the issue has followed that of Issue 0. the three recurring sections—field notes, fault lines, and addresses—began as the way my own poems seemed to arrange themselves. quiet observations, nature, domestic life, letting the world speak for itself, followed by moments of increasing tension, strain and emotional pain or transformation, often inner or outer turmoil, concluding with what was essentially a chapter of love poems; poems addressed to you.

for Issue 1, I have kept this structure. I suppose a lot of the poems that resonate with me fall into these categories.

but, from the beginning, before submissions even started rolling in, I knew there was another chapter waiting: blueprints. I wanted to have a chapter on nostalgia, childhood, memory. I was lucky enough that several contributors found exactly that register without having been asked to. some of my favourite pieces in the issue live there. Bruce McRae’s The Many Summers felt like reliving my own childhood. I am not a boy, nor did I do much swimming in the river, but it still felt like remembering.

for field notes, you sent some beautiful observations that were a breath of fresh air for me. Fred Gerhard’s Personal Raindrop quietly inverts the search for meaning. he makes himself into a sign after looking for one (a God who answers back, though perhaps in ways the small things can’t understand, a lovely cycle of hope and beauty and uncertainty).

in fault lines, there were thought-provoking spirals patiently unpicked and laid bare through beautiful, sometimes dark verse. Nattie O’Sheggzy’s Ironclad Paperweight Monarch, in particular, makes you uneasy with its question of whether beauty will survive our attempts to aggressively possess it.

in our addresses chapter, longing seemed to eclipse love this time, and I have to thank you from the bottom of my heart for trusting me with that heartbreak. it surely is held safe and sacred here.

future issues

if you would like to submit to future issues, our address is submissions@mushroomrain.org or you can click here.

I don’t usually ask for a theme, so, as always, short stories, excerpts, diary entries, finished poems, unfinished poems, random notes, visual art — all welcome.

the deadline for Issue 2 is 1 October 2026.

HOWEVER, as Issue 2 will be our autumn issue, I would like to invite work that explores the concept of  transformation. if you have any pieces written during, after or about a period of change, please share them with me as the leaves turn and fall.

thank you for your trust and support, happy reading / writing / creating!

love,

beth x

instagram: @mushroomrainmag
substack: @elizabethjo