I confess it feels a bit foolish to be publishing our Spring Issue as the summer begins. We have our reasons, or should I say excuses.
This is the first year we are going to publish three issues and the first time we have had only one reading period for submissions. All this takes some adjustment.
When we first decided to do this, a technology-minded acquaintance asked me, “Won’t your content be out of date by the time you publish it?” This first made me laugh and then made me sad.
Because we are publishing online, people expect us to keep up with the web-based Joneses, that is, those websites who publish new stuff every few hours, and constantly update their social media. The ones who make the World Wide Web seem like one giant news service ever ready to post the next status update. Because, as we all know, Stuff.Is.Happening.All.The.Time.
And hey, we get that. We have a blog and a Facebook page and a Twitter feed.
But we like to think of carte blanche as a place where you can stop to contemplate, to take the time to indulge your imagination and reinvent Orpheus and Eurydice or the Boer war, or find the stories hidden in rust and abandoned places. A place to take refuge from the constant updates and think about the meaning of things.
The wonderful Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan, speaking at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2007, referring to Ezra Pound’s famous quote, said: “Literature is not Lifestyle – it is Life. It is the news that stays news. For his demonstration of man’s intricate lust for power and war, Homer’s Iliad is the news that stays news. For his wild jokes at the expense of man’s seriousness, Rabelais is the news that stays news. For his insight into vanity, history and the state, Shakespeare is the news that stays news…”
(And yes, O’Hagan said this way back in 2007.)
And so we bring you Issue 17, a little later than we had hoped, but no less relevant, a collection of stories, poems, comics, and photography that we believe will stay news.