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This issue marks a significant shift of emphasis for Dream Catcher. We are pleased to welcome a new fiction editor, Chris Firth, whose short-story collection for younger readers, Hocus Pocus Hullabaloo is published by Solomon Press. Chris received one of the Arts Council of England Writers’ Awards in 2000. We also wish to express our gratitude to Ian McMillan for his continuing support and are pleased to welcome him as Patron of Dream Catcher Literary Arts. Heather Harker, the Lincolnshire-based artist, has provided stunning visual images for this issue, continuing our on-going policy of creating a space for the visual alongside the verbal. Our poetry editor, Ian Parks, sees the publication this year of Departures and Rendezvous: Love Poems 1980-2000 (Jonathan Cape).

Among the books sent to the magazine over the last few months two were outstanding: Anne Carson’s Men in the Off Hours (Jonathan Cape, 2000) and Ian Seed’s The Stranger (Moss & Flint Books, 2000). We reprint a poem from each. Seed’s collection is, in effect, a selected poems, distilling twenty-five years of work into around fifty pages. In contrast, the American poet, Anne Carson, works within a more expansive, experimental tradition: one in which she is able to invest the most un-poetic material (such as documentaries and interviews) with emotional intensity and verve.

While maintaining our well-established links with Yorkshire, issue number 8 of Dream Catcher reflects another shift of emphasis. With the recent appointment of our general editor Paul Sutherland as Literature Development Officer for Lincolnshire we are looking to explore and encourage the work of writers from the Midlands and beyond.