Doris Ober

The West Marin Review, for which I'm managing editor, is a community partnership between a popular local book store (Point Reyes Books), a community non-profit organization (Tomales Bay Library Assoc.), and friends and neighbors. The book features both fine and homespun art, prose, and poetry. Without our trying to make it so, the works in the Review's first volume and this second one share an appreciation for the natural world, an attention to the details of life and the vastness of it, and honest perspectives on subjects from agrarian to urbane.

Most content is selected by "reviewers": a panel for poetry, one for prose, and a team of artists reviewing art. Some pieces are solicited. Our contributors, residents and visitors to West Marin, are from everywhere—East Coast, West Coast, South of the Border, overseas—and they are every sort of people: in addition to professional writers, artists, and poets, there are psychotherapists, teachers, students, innkeepers, house cleaners, carpenters, and at least one attorney and one firefighter that we know of.

In this issue, poetry, prose, and art are direct and oblique, whimsical and serious, inward observing and outward observing. You'll find history in a story here, in a mural, in yellowed cross-written letters preserved by a family; you'll see art in a poet's handwritten poem, in the serendipity of pinhole photographs; and you'll glimpse evidence of the poets' and the artists' way of seeing, microscopically and magnificently.