A second, perhaps more weighty reason for lit mags to justifiably continue to pop up like mushrooms came to me during the long process of working with others to create this issue. We put out one classified ad on NewPages, and submissions began pouring in by the hundreds. Some came from overseas, but most from here in the North America.
The plethora of previously unpublished work in these pages, from Danielle Gray’ s piercing memoir of childhood in an ever-shifting family, to Maia Lynn Anderson’ s surreal fictional journey through age and consciousness and gender, to Charles Rammelkamp’ s quiet poetic musings over political clashes between relatives, should make clear that the stream of good, unknown writing is unlikely to run dry anytime soon.
Let me put this another way: writers in the U. S. are out in such tremendous multitudes that an editor of a new magazine can buy a single ad, receive an inundation of submissions, and be assured that if she reads them consistently and with discipline, she will eventually find much worth publishing. This is a joy and a marvel. There can perhaps be no greater reason than this that new lit mags continue to propagate: there is always enough good work to sustain us.
James Dunham Dec. 24, 2016
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