Dear Readers,
Welcome to Issue 61 of The Collagist. This is a very special issue for us: it's our fifth anniversary! We're so glad you're here to help us celebrate.
On August 15, 2009, founding editor Matt Bell published Issue 1, and with it, our first Letter from the Editor. He wrote, "Rather than risk going on too long about the reason for The Collagist—this is, after all, a friendly letter, not a manifesto—I'd rather get right to introducing the great work that fills these electronic pages." Five years on, we couldn't agree more.
To that effect, in this, our fifth anniversary issue, we have fiction from Anne Valente, Dave Housley, Matt Dojny, and George Singleton. We have excerpts from Henning Koch's The Maggot People, Alan Michael Parker's The Committee on Town Happiness, and David Ohle's The Old Reactor. We have poetry from Maureen Seaton, Christopher Pexa, Molly Damm, and Patrick Rosal. We have nonfiction from Eric Tran, and we have review coverage of Stanley Crawford's Travel Notes (reviewed by Patrick Crerand), Phong Nguyen's Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History (reviewed by James Orbesen), Luke Goebel's Fourteen Stories, None of then Are Yours (reviewed by Tom DeBeauchamp), and Jamie Iredell's I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac (reviewed by Nicole Sheets).
Every month, we are grateful to our contributors, to our readers, and to all of the writers who entrust their words to us, and this month is no exception. On our fifth anniversary, we also wanted to say a special thank you to our publisher, Dzanc Books. As you might have noticed, all of our excerpts come from books that Dzanc has recently released or will release soon, and all of our fiction comes from Dzanc authors, too—George Singelton's Between Wrecks (from which "Operation" is taken) is out now; Matt Dojny's novel The Festival of Earthly Delights is just out in paperback; Anne Valente's collection, By Light, We Knew Our Names, will be out in October; and Dave Housley's collection, If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home, is scheduled to come out in January, 2015.
It is an honor to be editing The Collagist, an honor made possible by Steve Gillis and Dzanc Books. We are grateful. While we're at it, Guy Intoci and Jeffrey Gleaves also deserve a great deal of credit for their help with this issue, and Dan Wickett, Steven Seighman, and of course (most of all) Matt Bell deserve credit for contributing so much toward making this magazine what it is. As do you, dear reader, for visiting us. Thank you!
Sincerely,
Gabriel Blackwell and Matthew Olzmann