by Michael J. H. MacNeill
Two years ago I got a wild hair up my ass and decided to make a fiction magazine. There weren’t many magazines out there that produced what I wanted.
What I wanted was the equivalent of a low budget, terrible-but-great horror movie. Despite having no budget, and despite having no directorial skills and no trained actors and no sober crewmembers, a bunch of enthusiastic fans with a camera and a heart of gold can still make something incredible. And by incredible, I mean incredibly bad. But something magical happens with these kinds of bad movies. The audience can quickly adopt the movie’s shortcomings, and, somewhere along the line, the chemistry of the water changes. It’s the puppet show effect. Don’t bother hiding the strings. Everybody can tell that it’s a puppet. There are no illusions. The strings don’t matter. You can still enjoy the show.
I wanted that DIY, screw the rules, “lean in” quality in a literary magazine. And, equally as important, I wanted to show off the good work that my writing group was producing. Most importantly, I wanted to reestablish subterranean mutants and slimy, semi-erotic monsters into the great Literary Conversation. So I got to work, learned what I needed to learn, and put out the word.
That’s when I realized I had been fucking up.
