July 2009

About This Issue

I am super proud of the work the fiction, poetry, book reviews editor have done in this issue. We have a large volume of great fiction, probably the largest in one issue yet! Along with the interesting variety of fiction, as well as the poetry and book reviews we have, we now also have a page dedicated to "creative non-fiction." Creative non-fiction is the personal essay that's not necessarily of a scholarly nature. This opens up an area we have not explored very much at this point and I'm looking forward to seeing where that will go.

I am very happy with what we have posted, and will keep struggling to balance an increasingly complex life with this all-volunteer effort. It means a lot to many people, including me, that this site has been around for more than 10 years now! We've been the place where many scholars, fiction writers, poets and book reviewers have gotten their start towards illustrious publication careers, and we can't be more proud of that.

Now, for the technical behind-the-scenes details.

This is the last issue in which we will take unsolicited scholarly work. From now on, we're going to do one themed scholarly issue a year, which will be guest edited, and scholarly essays will only be from solicitation of the guest editor. If you're interested in submitting scholarly work, keep your eyes out for the calls for submission which will be posted when we get them together. I anticipate this scholarly issue being the January issue.

Book reviews, poetry, fiction, personal essays, author interviews will still be published on a bi-yearly basis according to when we receive them. If you're interested in submitting any of those, please see the contribute page for guidelines (& follow them... it makes it much easier to track you down).

In this issue, we tried to streamline some processes, with Natasha doing some new HTML formatting of book reviews & other editors teaming up to make their poetry/ fiction and other submissions get in on time and formatted easily. But every innovation causes another issue, it seems.

This time, my own email was not forwarding attachments properly, and things people sent me got waylaid by an errant spam filter. If the sender was timid and assumed the answer was "no" then they may not have said anything, queried us as to the status. If they were more assertive & sent emails, they still may have taken forever to hear from someone. I've fixed, I think, the forwarding attachments problem. I've got my folders properly organized again. The only problem was I didn't know there was a problem for the longest time, so things were going astray that I have no clue about. This was all my fault and not the fault of the fiction, poetry, or book reviews editors. So if you've sent a document with an attachment and are not seeing it published here, and did not hear from an editor, please query me to see what happened at kimwells[at]womenwriters[dot]net.

Always,

Kim Wells