It defeats the point to say we’re excited about the next issue, because we’re always excited about the next issue as soon as we’ve put the previous one out there. But for various reasons that’ll soon be obvious, we had to avoid our usual habit of taking it right up to the wire with putting the finishing touches to our upcoming Issue Nine. So we can tell you that it’ll be hitting the net next Tuesday, October 5. Fire up your browser and get ready...
Though these are our nominations for Best of the Net, chosen from all the work we published in > kill author between July 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010, it’s truly impossible to choose the “best.” Because we wouldn’t choose to put it out there if we didn’t think it was the best. So think of these instead as some of our highlights; some of the work we think deserves a little more attention, a little more shouting about:
Downturn
by Stephen Daniel LewisA Serial Killer’s First Day in Medical School
by Ajay VishwanathanMoving Condiments
by Drew KalbachDelicacies
by Audra PuchalskiTrivial Pursuit
by Jennifer Gigantino
Do Not Let Them Take You
by Jason JordanMy Father Believes
by Alan Stewart Carl
Good luck to the nominees, and thanks again to all the writers who have contributed their fiction or poetry to this journal since we started — and made it so difficult to put together a list like this.
We know you’re getting impatient — we are too — but Issue Nine is nearly here. Really. Promise. Before that, we’ve got a last gasp for Issue Eight, as Cheyenne Nimes tells us about her favourite piece(s) from that collection. Yes, she chose more than one. Hey, we’re not going to argue with enthusiasm:
“Ryder Collins: ‘We Were Listening For The Shattering’ — An elevated note of the epic, an entire self-contained universe here, a snow-globe of pathos, of opposites, of a family along for the pick-up ride, a frame coexisting with the ‘crash coming from down the road.’ There is no staying out of anyone’s way. Not in the package store, nor away from the Campbell’s soup can frame, and soon the frame is all that’s left. The frame simply is.
Daniel Romo: ‘Translation’ — A novel packed in this 8-line piece. ‘…summer when we were young.’ Tendril, boy, ponytail, hurt, man. And there is Random. There it is. Flirty, to ass, to second hand smoke triumphant. Uplifting in an odd way.
Daniel Romo: ‘Buzzing’ — These one word titles. These lines that kill, ‘…after all you were young, and the wings were neatly torn’; ‘The bees start to circle’; ‘decadence and pastoral.’ Again, we’re on the menu, falling from the plane, in the din, the hum of it all. That’s the problem, though: there aren’t enough bugs in the world. This narrator is one of the few who knows.
Daniel Romo: ‘Revision’ — Romo always burrows further each layer, completing a circle with a conclusion. All acts have consequences and he follows everything equally because it all matters. Don’t kid yourself. It all matters.
Daniel Romo: ‘Attention’ — Ghostly. Mid-life crisis, sportscar upholstery and can’t you smell it? This piece makes me want to bust out, but of what? And how? Exactly? One can’t escape this air… And wiping a brow only to get answered by another gesture, kept in-check. Old-school style. Patriotic fibers and their imprinting stars and stripes across everything. There is no escaping Betsey Ross BS. You are HERE on a globe map with that little red X. A suit I’ll never wear: right here, immediately, I know where I am: I’m in my life and yours. Everyone’s. At the end we are all saluted by a liver-spotted veteran, the ghost of this peculiar country’s death.”
As soon as we heard about Zine-Scene, we were hooked and couldn’t wait for it to launch. Today, it has — a couple of weeks earlier than originally planned because the editors just couldn’t wait any longer (a feeling we know well).
Any site that describes its mission as being to “question the system that values print publication over electronic publication in the literary world today” was immediately going to get our attention. This is a subject that’s been discussed in endless comment threads in a few different places over recent months, but here’s a project that’s actually putting itself out there in a dynamic, positive way and actively talking up electronic publication.
Zine-Scene has three distinct parts to it. First, there’s the Zine Profile, and it’s the first of these that’s gone live today — focussing on decomP. The first Author Profile arrives next Monday (September 20), and then there’s “The Reprint”, which is a quarterly zine devoted to republishing content from print literary magazines. The first issue of that lands on November 1.
All good information. But we wanted to know more about Zine-Scene and hear about some of their thinking, their aims and their big ideas, so we asked Richard Mocarski, one of their editorial team, if he’d write a guest post for our blog. He kindly agreed. Here’s what he had to say:
Zine-Scene is a space to celebrate the high-quality literature published in online journals and the authors who create this literature. Zine-Scene will have bi-weekly spotlights on online journals and bi-weekly spotlights on authors who publish prolifically in online journals. These spotlights will run each Monday and will consist of an overview, a review, and an interview. Additionally, we will publish an online quarterly journal called “The Reprint,” which will publish fiction that was previously published in print.
I created Zine-Scene to break down the dominant discourse of the literati, which dictates that “the best” literature is published in print and in print only. The belief that print-is-king has deep roots due to the relative novelty of online publishing. These roots permeate through the literary elite and have the unfortunate effect of tainting writers as they enter the literary world. A glance at Speakeasy (Poets & Writers forum) reveals the perpetuation of this discourse. A glance at the resumes of writers who inhabit positions of power (faculty positions at the “top” programs) illustrates the power of this discourse and the means it uses to self-perpetuate. A glance at our slush pile reveals the reach of this discourse (submissions come in marked as “for print consideration only,” despite the fact that we only publish online).
I can understand where the print-is-king brigade is coming from. I used to be a part of it. In fact, I bet most people have been a part of it. That’s how dominant discourses work; they perpetuate themselves to the point where their values become the normative behavior.
For a long time I only read print magazines and only the big name journals whose fiction doesn’t take a lot of risks. I rarely ventured online and when I did, I found myself at my print stomping grounds, hoping to catch a glimpse into their print magazines with a free online sample. Where did this leave me? First bored, and then not reading at all.
And then my wife started publishing online. This was despite what some prominent literary folk had told her about online publishing (in a nutshell – why bother). It took one look for me to step back and re-evaluate my elitist attitude. Here was something exciting. I found where the risks were being taken: online. And to top it off – for free.
This change in reading habits came as I began my doctoral studies in Communication, where I have entrenched myself in the study of internet communication tools and discourses of power. As I immersed myself in great online writing, I continued to hear the literati decry it, and I began to read about hierarchies and hegemonic discourses — the correlations became obvious and my passion for online literature grew. So the idea for Zine-Scene was born.
It’s been about a year since I first thought of starting Zine-Scene, and in that time some of my thoughts galvanized. I realized that I wanted to make a statement as well as promote good work. This is where “Zine” came from. I know this word causes many online publishers and writers to cringe because “Zine” is traditionally associated with do-it-yourself staple-bound media and has morphed into a term with negative undertones. But I want to take this word back. Whether the writing is hand-wrought, photocopied, diagonal, smudged, upside down or on a computer screen, the work should be judged on its quality of thought and execution and not the method used to deliver it.
To further our goal of elevating the status of online writing we added an online journal, “The Reprint,” which publishes work that first appeared in print. It felt natural to add a space where the internet’s best asset (access) could be utilized to breathe fresh life into previously published (and now bookshelved) stories, and a space that should be immune to the condescension of the literati.
Things are changing. It is already possible to find authors who have literary clout, powerful positions, and online publications. We are not proclaiming the death of print, as there are many exciting and risky print journals produced today and print will never lose (nor should it) its place in the literary world. Our goal is to accelerate this new model, a model that includes online publications — to highlight the exciting literature of those people with a non-traditional kind of clout, of those magazines defining themselves outside the traditional boundaries of the literati.
— Richard Mocarski
We love it when people just say it:
“Screw not judging. I will judge. Not the nine-monthers, who may have their own reasons, but the truly unprofessional behavior I still see all the time in response to submissions. Here’s what I say, as an outsider, an interloper in the publishing/literary world: taking a year to respond with a form email that is two sentences long is not professional. That’s right. Rejecting someone in your submissions software but never letting them know? Not professional. Sending Xeroxed and chopped up quarter slips of paper for rejections? Totally unprofessional. Pretending you take shit from the slush pile all the time when really 99.9 percent of what you publish is solicited? Not professional. Sending rejections that say things like, ‘This was really pretty bad,’ or ‘yeah, didn’t care for this at all?’ So incredibly not professional.”
Essential reading: this blog post by Amber Sparks on the lengthy and often plain insulting response times from some literary magazines. Yeah, there’ll be some who say “Hey, don’t worry about it. Just move on. Submit somewhere else. Don’t get so hung up on response times. There are more important things in life.” There are. There are many more important things in life, but we all need smaller things to think about than the fact we’re all slowly choking ourselves to death in a haze of crazy pollution. So we worry, agonize and get angry about response times instead. Anyway, are we the only ones to notice that the kind of people who make the “lighten up” speeches are usually those who have moved on from the submitting game?
Look, to us, it’s simple. Beyond everything, response times are about one simple thing: showing some respect for your fellow writers. That’s it.
(Before putting up this quote and encouraging you to read Amber’s post, we obviously took a look at our own response times. We’re not bad. Sometimes we could do better — everyone could always do better — but any delay in responding is usually to do with mundane stuff like having to work for a living, not because we’re busy enjoying our supreme editorial power by sitting on a huge pile of submissions, laughing our asses off as we sip the freshly squeezed blood of a penniless intern.)
Like many magazines and journals out there, we’re saying goodbye to email for submissions. All that labeling and filing and finding stuff again was taking up precious time that should be used reading what you send us. So we’ve signed up with the excellent Submishmash, and all submissions will now be handled via killauthor.submishmash.com. Though we’d still encourage you to read our full guidelines before sending us your work.
Note the first: if you’ve recently submitted work using the traditional email route, you’ll still receive a response. The new system only kicks in from today.
Note the second: None of this affects yesterday’s call for a guest (almost) editor to write an introduction for the next issue. If you’re interested in that, then get in touch via our mail@killauthor.com address.