Dear Pegasus readers,
My name is Suz, and I’m the editor of Pegasus. I am an English/ESL teacher and poet living with my wife in Lexington, KY. We have four cats and a senior chihuahua whom we affectionately call “the stinky babies.” I joined the editorial team about a year ago, and I’ve fallen utterly in love with the editorial process. I was overwhelmed by the amount and quality of submissions we received for this edition. The poems are rich and textured, and I was specifically struck by the balance of fierceness and ache.
I never considered that I would be writing this note alone. For the spring 2025 edition of Pegasus, Thrower and I sat in a coffee shop with our tandem laptops and wrote the editor’s note together. It felt like playing jazz or making a well-loved recipe from memory. We were both surprised at how easy it felt to bring our different poetic sensibilities and personalities together to write about the burden of summer – the heat, the garden exacting her price for abundance.
Thrower didn’t plant a garden this year. He and his spouse had converted their garden space back to grass in the hopes of selling the house. During our final phone call, I asked him if he was tending anything. He told me he watered the herbs on the porch every morning before it got too hot, told me his body and his art were faithfully exacting their price.
He dedicated so much of his creative life to amplifying the voices of other poets and artists. He had decades of experience in publishing – from zines all the way to well-respected literary journals. When I asked him about the endeavor of publishing his own work, he huffed and I could almost hear his shrug through the phone, “I don’t know, that’s just not important to me.” I was envious of the fact that he really wrote poems for the love of the craft. He wrote because it was one of the many ways he told the truth.
He was thrilled we were doing a print edition for the fall. I told him that I would leave only the fun parts of the process for him to do. In true Thrower fashion, he replied, “I love the not fun parts!” If any part of this literary journal is excellent moving forward, it is because of what he taught me and what he built before I got here.
Thrower loved Pegasus. He was so excited about what it was becoming. We both loved making something together – my newbie energy, his expertise, my doe-eyed curiosity, his cheeky cynicism. We made magic as an editorial team. More than losing my fellow editor, though, I just miss my friend.
This edition of Pegasus is dedicated to you, pal. Please sprinkle a little bit of your Thrower spice onto this journal from wherever you are.
Sincerely,
Suz Spearman-Orlando
Pegasus Editor
Pegasus 