Dear Reader,
Best of the Web 2010 came out this month, and because my introduction to the volume mirrors many of my feelings about editing The Collagist, I thought I'd share a slightly abridged version of it here:
Thanks to my father, I grew up around computers: I started hitting the keys on a VIC-20 as a toddler, played computer games on early Commodore and IBM machines, and typed my middle school papers on my mother’s Apple IIc, the kind with that horrible, flickery green screen. Long before the internet, I learned to use a modem in the sixth grade, connecting to local bulletin board systems hosted out of other people’s houses, even though there wasn’t much reason to do so yet: a handful of files to download, a message board that moved glacially slowly, with only one user able to connect at any one time, and online gaming that was turn-based, as much about patience as it was strategy.
My first attempts at writing fiction included an awful fantasy novel I drafted in the summer between seventh and eighth grade, which I typed into that terrible blue screen text editor that used to come with MS-DOS because the hand-me-down computer I had in my bedroom wasn’t quite powerful enough to run Windows. Among other things, this means I never had an attachment to notebooks or certain brands of pens, never stained my fingers with typewriter ribbons or correction fluid. I have never typed a single page on a typewriter. I do not, in fact, know exactly how they work or what one’s component parts are called, although I’m sure I could look it up on Wikipedia.
I was in college for the second or third time before I began to read and write more seriously, and by then the internet had become a common part of everyday life. I was twenty and twenty-one and twenty-two, and looking for more books like the ones I was in love with—at the time, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Chuck Palahniuk, Kurt Vonnegut, Amy Hempel—and what I wanted to read I could not find in the few book stores available to me in the small town I lived in. Instead, I ordered books from Amazon and Powell’s and other book stores that were online, and as I did so I somehow found out about literary magazines, something I’d never been exposed to by a teacher or friend.
The print journals that had websites looked great, but back then I didn’t have extra money to buy literary magazines—around this time, I was living in my parents’ basement, then failing to successfully move out West in my van, then living with a couple in a house that was too small for two people, let alone three—and even if I had found the money, I wouldn’t have known what to buy. Instead, I turned to the internet, where I could read for free, where I could browse until I discovered something that resonated with me. It was early then, but there were already a number of great literary magazines in existence, publishing writers I’d heard of as well as ones I hadn’t. Because I had never been part of any old guard of print magazine editors or readers, I held no loyalties to that form, and dived into reading online literature as if the computer were as natural a place to read fiction and poetry as any other. For someone who’d grown up around computers, it probably was.
I can still remember some of the first magazines I ever read, many of which are thankfully still around and thriving, like failbetter, juked, and elimae, and I can still remember the first magazine I ever submitted my own fiction to: a website named Conversely that has been “on hiatus” since 2005.The reason I submitted there? I had read Tod Goldberg’s debut novel, Fake Liar Cheat, and recognized his prose as the work of someone who liked at least some of the same books I then liked. And so when I started searching for more of his work on the internet, I found Conversely and his story “Faith, Love, Hope,” which they published in 2001. I can remember thinking, “If this magazine publishes Tod Goldberg, and I write kind of like Tod Goldberg, maybe they’d like my stories too?”
Conversely didn’t publish that story, but when I finally did land my first publication, it was in another online journal. So were my second and third stories, as I recall, and certainly most of my first twenty or thirty publications. The first magazine that took a chance letting me work as an editor was online, as were all the other magazines I worked at, with the exception of Mid-American Review in grad school. My first book reviews were published online, and almost all of my writers’ groups have been organized by internet, conducted via email as much as in person. There are dozens of other stories I might tell like the one above, and each of them is just one example of how the internet literary scene helped me become the writer and reader and editor I have become—that I am, of course, still becoming—by introducing me to the dozens and dozens of writers who have become my inspirations, my peers and my editors, and my friends.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but my story is not unique. There are now over a thousand online journals, and exponentially more readers and writers who have made the internet an integral part of their literary life, who have come into their own careers with online literature as a constant component of their day-to-day interactions with the written word.
In past years, much has been made of the “split” between the internet and the print world (as if nearly every print journal did not also have a website, as if every book is not also available for sale online, as if those spheres will ever be mutually exclusive ever again), but that is no longer a conversation I’m interested in having at great length. I do not believe an argument can still be made that the print journals are “better” than the web ones, or vice versa, or the argument that the internet literary scene is somehow diminished by the fact that “anyone” can start a literary journal, since that’s no more or less true now than it was in the days before the internet. There is room—and perhaps even a need—for our literary community to have both print and online incarnations, and for both to thrive. We’re lucky to have as many options as we do, arguably more than any generation of readers and writers has ever had.
The big story this year has been what will happen to publishing now that people are reading on cell phones and e-readers and laptops everywhere they go, as if this represents some sort of shift away from “reading” toward some new, more nebulous and not yet understood activity. Maybe the marketing departments are right and it is some new paradigm about to explode, but every time I read another article about the rise of the e-book I wonder if this phenomenon isn’t simpler than it’s been made out to be. Isn’t it at least possible that this is less a schism between the print world and some technology-driven future than it is simply a sign that there is some class of people who desire to read everywhere they go? The kind of readers who have always kept books in their purses and briefcases, but now also desire to turn the tools of work and drudgery—the company computer, for instance, or else the always-on Blackberry—into objects of intellectual and emotional liberation, points of entry into the online literary world, so capable of delivering stories and poems and essays at any moment?
I think it is possible. I think it’s probably true, and that this sentiment will continue to spread in the years to come.
Thanks to the internet and the various ways we now interact with it, much of the world has become a book, and also a place in which to read one.
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As mentioned at the beginning, the above appeared in more or less similar form as my introduction to Best of the Web 2010, the third edition of Dzanc's yearly anthology highlighting the best fiction, poetry, and non-fiction published in online journals. While work published in The Collagist is, for obvious reasons, disqualified from being considered for the book, we did have a number of former contributors to the magazine that were also included in the anthology with work published elsewhere. In an addition to our regularly scheduled podcasts and interviews, we'll also be speaking to some of those contributors about their BotW contributions on our blog, so please remember to stop by often and enjoy that additional content.
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In this, our twelfth issue, we have fiction by David Hollander, Hannah Pass, Ben Segal, and A. Wolfe, as well as a novel excerpt from Joshua Mohr's Termite Parade, out this month from Two Dollar Radio. This month's poetry includes work by Perry Janes, Subhashini Kaligotla, Sarah Rose Nordgren, and Jon Pineda.
Our non-fiction this month comes from both B.J. Hollars and returning contributor Jonathan Callahan, whose essay "Some Thoughts that Begin with Kafka and Bernhard but Wind Up Straying Rather Far Afield Indeed," takes second-place (I believe) as the longest single piece we've yet published, behind only his own story from Issue Two, "The Consummation of Dirk."
Finally, we have book reviews of Conditions Uncertain & Likely to Pass Away by Frank Stanford, in this alone impulse by Shya Scanlon, and We Are Never as Beautiful as We Are Now by Adam Gallari, the last written by Gabriel Blackwell, another returning contributor, whose story "Play" appeared in Issue Six.
As always, thanks to all of our contributors for letting us publish their fine work. Thanks also to everyone who reads the magazine, everyone who sends us submissions, and of course everyone who takes the time to post about the issue to their blogs, Facebook, or anywhere else. We appreciate your time and talents, and can't thank you enough for sharing them with us.
Sincerely,
Matt Bell
Editor
The Collagist