Our general practice is to publish one writer/poet/artist for a sole spotlight on the main page for 7 days. Admittedly, the times might vary. Once a decent number (usually 6) of such spotlights have been featured we archive the material together as an issue and start over again. You can find these issues in our issues & occupants section, where each individual contributor is also listed.
Our belief is that it's possible to carve out a little room of exclusive (intimate, personal, contemplation) in such a vast and often impersonal sea of information and one-click social interaction that the internet offers. Perhaps we are out-of-touch romantics, but we were once touched at the core by what writing and art at its best can do and that is the feeling that we return in the hopes of meeting. The messy business of empathy, the primal need to communicate and know what it means to exist.
Sometimes we get bored of the format, as one gets in the kitchen, having cooked the same meal over and over, and we try to shake things up. It seems to us that there must be many ways that an online magazine can present work to its readers that a handheld book can't. We are curious about what those ways could be. We keep searching.
If we have a preference it is in favor of heartfelt and confessional writing. The things you jot down late at night when you have to, because the need, often unexpectedly, demands it. Sometimes the accidental out-writes the careful, sometimes the other way around. Follow the feeling. We like a good strong "I" that does things. We like personal. We like characters/narrators which allows us to get inside their heads, and that goes for poetry too. We care little for clever phrase-turning, academic indifference, incestuous word puzzles. Clever is clever because it's not funny. Be funny. Put some despair in your funny. Put some funny in your despair. Let there be some goddamn there too, in your pen when you write, sometimes anguished, sometimes gentle. Let there be some fire, some duende. Write, write but read more. Don't ignore the basic transaction that language allows for: communicating what you feel, how you view the world, to someone else.
Most of the writing that we end up not accepting suffers not, as one might perhaps expect, from poor writing skills, cliched imagery or overly personal and sentimental material. Rather it suffers the opposite. Frigidity, if you will. We can see that the writing is good but it doesn't make us feel anything. We don't sense that the writer genuinely cares about the character or poem and so why should we? Make us care. As if, ironically, afraid to appear sentimental and obvious, afraid to get in the way of the writing, the writer has removed himself so far from the material that all that's left is that removal, and all that we see is the writer trying to not be seen. To this we want to say: It's OK. Be seen. Don't hold back. Make it personal, and yes, write from the heart. Have fun. Be sentimental, take risks, and take risks close to home. Make us feel something. We want to feel things.
That is all. Stay a while. Have a cup. Read something. Write something. We hope to hear from you.
