ISSUE #10
Editors note:
This is Brave New Word Magazine Issue 10. Wow! What can I say - it was a long road. Originally, I have planned to post Issue 10 almost immediately after dropping the second part of Issue 9 - in the early April. But then the reality kicked in. I had no time to fully commit to composing an issue due to intense workload.
And there was also another significant problem - extremely lacking submissions. The primary reason for a significant delay in-between issues 9 and 10 was lack of good stuff. Plain and simple. I just couldn't find anything fitting for BNW for quite a while. And since I didn't wanted to make a passable issue - i was waiting for the good stuff to be submitted. Eventually, it paid off. But it was a long time coming.
At one point, I was considering ghostwriting some of the stuff to fill the gaps. For the first time since I have started this magazine, i was experiencing such thing. It was frustrating and disappointing. When I posted a call for submissions over several groups on Facebook and Reddit - I was expecting a lot of things to happen. I was ready for an endless stream of insults and bullshit as it usually happened immediately after placing the calls, but this time it was strangely civil - every submitter was polite and generous.
However, for some reason, the majority of the submissions were missing the point of the magazine. As if the submission guidelines were too ambiguous and unclear. And it was a catastrophe. Instead of anything even remotely resembling an experimental effort I was getting more and more of some insipid, vapid, milquetoast bazoo that was already all over the internet.
Here's the thing - Brave New Word is about pushing boundaries, trying something new - not just a place where you can dump your shit.
And then, when I thought the worst was behind - more fun had happened. In April I had an email bombing episode. Over the course of 24 hours, I've received over a thousand letters of unknown origins.
None of them were identified as spam, so all this goodness went straight to my inbox. I felt dumbfounded when I saw it in the morning. It felt surreal. The letters were strange but adequate. It wasn't exactly a spam - the messages were clearly composed by some advanced text generator. They made sense, there were no malicious links or some other shady stuff - just some very generic text that flew over the radar.
There were things like "hello, how are you?" and then some retelling of some joke or recap of some Westworld episode in very verbose language. It was creepy at times but nothing special. Even the email addresses were resembling legitimate email addresses - most of them were hosted on Yahoo, AOL, Zoho, and ProtonMail. Someone put an effort in this attack.
The challenge was that I had no way to determine which letter was which by a preview. It wasn't effective enough - I saw stuff but it could've been a letter from a real person. The problem was that there were real letters lost in-between and I didn't wanted to dispose them too. And so I was forced go through this horde of letters one by one. It took me almost two months to clear the mess. Long story short - it was unmemorable.
But in the end, it was totally worth it. There was a lot of good stuff in-between the bad letters. These pieces formed a backbone of this issue. After a while, it finally started to come together and so here it is.
Enjoy!
***
Table of Contents:
- Alyssa Trivett - Two poems
- Mike Busam - Ten Pieces
- Heller Levinson - Three Poems
- Arnold McBay - Two Code Gifs
- Michael Orr - Two Spoon Pieces
- David Subacchi - Two poems
- Billy Mavreas - Four visual pieces
- Jonathan Mulcahy-King - Four poems
- Rrose Selaby - Two Collages
- Rus Khomutoff - Five poems
- Clay Thistleton - One found poem
- Ira Lightman - Six poems
- Michael McAloran - Nowhereon Sequence 5