Editor’ s Note
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F YOU HAD asked me during my MFA whether the world needed yet another lit mag, I probably would have said“ no.” There were already so many that no one could read them all, and getting published in one carried less career weight than it used to. Few paid. Yet here I am, years later, with the help of only a few dedicated volunteers, editing another brand new magazine. What changed? I had already known that every lit mag inescapably derived from its editors’ aesthetic, and that there were, at least in theory, as many aesthetics as there were editors. But in practice, as a submitting writer, I found that most publications took an“ anything goes as long as it’ s good” approach on their submission guidelines. Nevertheless, these publications exhibited, as they must, a specific editorial taste. So why the ubiquitous“ send us your best work” instead of something more narrow and, dare I say it, more honest?
My best conjecture was that editors wanted to be surprised and to publish something they wouldn’ t have expected to fit their definition of“ good.” But I wondered if that hurt more than it helped, leaving writers submitting every which way to see what, like spaghetti, ended up sticking.( I still believe there exist too many lit mags for one to get a sense of every editor’ s aesthetic by reading them all, and since many have rotating mastheads, this becomes impossible regardless.) Instead, why not attract submitters to magazines likely to enjoy their work? For editors to articulate their aesthetics in detail would better pair them with writers of similar vision.
So the degree to which a new lit mag can contribute to the literary landscape is not one of quantity as much as of quality. As long as a magazine has both a unique aesthetic and a strong articulation of it, writers gain an opportunity to seek aesthetic compatibility and not yet another blank wall at which to hurl their proverbial spaghetti. The Quiet Circle’ s website describes our aesthetic in as much detail as possible in hopes of achieving this end.
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