Dear reader,
Welcome to Issue 103 of The Rupture!
After ten years of publishing as The Collagist, we’ve taken on a new form, a new address, and a new name. We’ve retained our wonderful staff, though, and we’ll keep working our hardest to retain you, our readers, through publishing the kind of work you’ve come to expect from this magazine, under whatever name.
Not only is this our first issue as The Rupture, it’s also our first as a completely independent publication. We’re very excited to be striking out on our own, but, with a venture like this one, “on our own” and “independent” aren’t really the whole story—after all, we need you, too, dear reader, and we’re so very glad to have you here with us.
In his letter from the editor in Issue #1, our founding editor, Matt Bell, explained why this magazine was started: “to find ways to publish and promote individual pieces by a wider population of emerging and established writers.” Ten years later, we’re still doing that, and we’re still committed to finding the widest possible readership for those pieces and those writers by publishing online with no paywalls, no ads, and no submission fees.
When we thought about how we wanted to (re)define ourselves for the next ten years, we thought primarily about the work that gets us most excited, the thing that explains our existence, writing that, as our poetry editor Marielle Prince put it, is after the “breaking of some kind of silence, refusing to leave something alone, troubling it, stressing it to see what happens.” A rupture is not merely the end to a silence, but, more broadly speaking, is also the end to something static and the beginning of something dynamic. We feel that’s an apt description of the work you’ll find herein.
This first issue of The Rupture features birth and abrupt change, as may only seem natural for a new venture like this one, but it also features the recognition of the unfamiliar in (what one assumed was once) the deeply familiar, for example, in a family history, or even human history, and that, too, seems appropriate for this issue of The Rupture. (There are also tractors and QiGong, bear cubs and Big Wheels, vernix and Honda Civics, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, and the moon.) We hope you enjoy it!
Sincerely,
Gabriel Blackwell
Editor
The Rupture