“Water~Stone Review” (WSR) held its annual reading on Friday, Nov. 21, at Sundin Music Hall for its 28th volume. This event brought together authors of prose and verse alike to read their works from this year’s edition of the WSR, subtitled “Shape Still Warm.”

The reading, which was prefaced by forewords from the WSR’s editors, drew in a sizable crowd of listeners. Refreshments were provided afterwards, and copies of “Shape Still Warm” were displayed for sale near the Hall’s entrance.

The WSR is Hamline’s literary annual that publishes creative fiction and nonfiction from a variety of authors. Hamline’s Creative Writing Program manages it, and students in the Creative Writing MFA course work as editors and content reviewers. It’s analogous to “Runestone,” which is the online exclusive literary annual managed by BFA Creative Writing students.

“It’s a really incredible opportunity for our graduate students to have an opportunity to work on an internationally-recognized literary journal,” Richard Pelster-Wiebe said, a Senior Lecturer in the Creative Writing Department, regarding the behind-the-scenes workings of the WSR. “They get to be a fiction editor, a poetry editor, a nonfiction editor. They’re actually working with these writers from around the world who have submitted their works to be published in ‘Water~Stone.’”

While there is no official theme of any given WSR publication and the assorted authors of the Review do not intentionally coordinate one either, no writing exists in isolation. As noted in Meghan Maloney-Vinz’s Letter from the Executive Editor in the issue, the WSR has become “an unexpected (and unintentional) microcosm of the political whims and direction of the country.”

Many of the works read out loud that night — Mary Jane LaVigne’s “Denizens of the Exit Ramp,” about the bulldozing of an unhoused community, and Steve Castro’s “Most Likely an imperative from a Confederate soldier’s descendant,” about the indignity of deep-rooted racism in today’s America, for example — seem to have been written in response to the increasingly hostile political landscape that the people, particularly artists, have found themselves in.

In the midst of that hostility, however, these artists have also found community. Zeke Caligiuri, one of the speakers and the author of “Debts”, spoke afterwards about joining a writers’ collective while incarcerated and how the WSR and the writing community surrounding it has supported them and many of the artists he knows.

“I believe in supporting the ecosystem of writers, and the Twin Cities ecosystem of writers includes ‘Water~Stone”. I was incarcerated, and I was a part of a community of people who got together and built writers’ collectives because we believed in each other’s art and believed that we needed to take responsibility for the things that we cared about. It opened up a pathway for me to have a life out here, to be a working writer, and to be able to live in the community and be supported by really good, open-minded people,” Caligiuri said.

“Shape Still Warm” is currently available for sale on “Water~Stone Review’s” website, along with free excerpts from select works in the volume.