Welcome to Issue #4 of ASP's Literary Journal. I'm a little surprised it's here, as I never did resolve the space issue for the website pages. I suspect I never will either - coding is not really my thing. If there are any budding coders out there who fancy volunteering their services then ASP would be most gracious in receiving that aid! In order to get Issue #4 out I have had to take the drastic action of deleting Archive #1 - this will be the situation from now on I'm afraid. The welcome page remains, but none of the content - this is to afford proof for the contributors of publication. I had planned on having four archives at any one time, but with spacing being such a problem, ASP will now only ever have two active archived issues.
As usual with no specific theme to the journal our successful contributors have served up a diverse selection of prose, poetry and artwork for your delight. But before you jump in and savour our offerings, our incumbent Poetry Editor would like to say a few words:
"I really enjoyed reading all of the submissions, and it was a delight to find so many different styles and interesting subjects. The whole process was completely anonymised, so I had no idea who had written any of the poems. It wasn't easy to pick the final ten, and there were many excellent poems that, on this occasion, were not selected simply because another poem really jumped out at me." Rachel Carney, ASP Guest Poetry Editor, July 2021.
With the publication of Issue #4 we will be saying goodbye to Rachel and we thank her for all her efforts - there were a lot of poems! Probably 250-300 poems for her to sift through, hence both the diversity of those chosen and the difficulty she had in making a choice of just ten poets. Thank you, Rachel.
Issue #5 will see the role of Poetry Editor taken up by Jamie Spracklen, an experienced editor in his own right and ASP welcomes him onboard as our new and permanent Poetry Editor. Be sure to check out our submissions guidelines for the next issue, as I'm sure Jamie will have his own criteria for what he will be looking for.
Enough chat - time to read - So, dip in, stay for as long as you like, or have time for. Remember we are always here, if you only have time for one poem now, maybe another time you’ll have time for a longer stay. Enjoy, have fun and we hope the content remains with you long after you have left.
Dogs Darnborough, Editor-in-Chief.