To Whom It May Inspire:It’s that time again. Our intrepid literary zine is now accepting submissions! I know, right? Issue 3, already! Can you believe it? Are you wondering how we do it? (Cue vigorous nodding.)
Honestly, sometimes, we almost don’t. Sometimes, say, after a grueling year of editing your favorite new publication, sometimes we consider throwing in the towel, we consider careers as astronauts or venture capitalists or trophy wives. Sometimes we wonder how anything ever becomes anything at all.
And then we remember: Anything that is anything now was nothing before it was something. And between that nothing and something was an idea that could have been abandoned somewhere in the forest of almost. How many ideas have we forgotten because we didn’t write them down, or because we wrote them off when they sounded hard? How many magazines don’t exist for every one page we manage to manifest? That forest of almost is easy to miss, what with all those trees in the way.
Too often we forget how much of anything is simply an accumulation, of trees, of words, of time, just putting one foot in front of the other while we’re lost in the forest, before we can see what — if anything — is ahead. In order to do something, anything, we decide to stop being afraid of that dark mystery almost, our fear of what it will or won’t be, and instead just to do it anyway. We quit acting like our lives won’t start until certain impossible criteria are met. We do it now. We venture into almost and see what happens.
So, in the spirit of things we almost didn’t do — like start this magazine, but aren’t we glad we did! — we are excited to announce the theme of our third issue, you guessed it: We Still Like Almost.
In the Almost issue, we’ll be raising our glass and putting down ink in honor of all that is almost finished, almost perfect, almost famous, almost here, almost gone, almost over. Here’s to what’s on the brink, what’s still a sliver of possibility, what’s potential energy on the cusp of becoming kinetic. We’re collecting the ephemeral and the phantom, all that very nearly was or is about to be, any Nice Trys or Pipe Dreams you’ve got lying around. We want to talk about approximations, about the spaces in between in-betweens (call them liminal if you’re in grad school). Let’s defy definition, defy inner critics, defy genre. Send us poetry, fiction, foetry, lyric essays, factual fairy tales, love notes folded into fortune cookies, the cover letter you wrote for the job you didn’t want anyway. We want your unchecked to-do lists, your receded hairline, your fumbled pass. Send us pieces written by your imaginary friends, drawings of the ideas you had but then forgot, uninventions, photographs of ghosts, your collection of error messages and returned diamond rings. Send us anything ALMOST.
You have almost (that is to say slightly-more-than) one month: The deadline is February 14. If your work almost fits the theme, or doesn’t fit at all, that’s fine too, send it anyway. And, if you almost miss the deadline... well, you get the idea.
We’ve got a fancy new submission form where you can upload your anything-almost here: http://westilllike.
Sure, it’s the Shoulda-Coulda-Woulda issue. But we won’t take any excuses.
We’re Almost There!
Love,
We Still Like
