We’ve got interviews with the following folks going up in the July issue of Word Riot:
Wally Lamb
Lewis Nordan
(these first appeared in Paper Street, a biannual print journal and are courtesy of Dory Adams)
Charles Plymell
The July issue goes live July 15. It’s going to be massive. The Word document I’m coding it in right now is like 122 pages. And I haven’t even added the poetry yet. Yeesh.
Word Riot Press’ Mind Games, a short story collection by David Gianatasio, is now available for pre-order.
The book costs $10 and will be available September 2008.
Word Riot - http://www.wordriot.org
Prose by Patricia Abbott, Linda Boroff, Scott Boyan, Gretchen Clark, Sean Cunningham, Steve Finbow, Heather Fowler, Scott Hughes, Stephanie Johnson, Mike Jones, Anthony J. Mohr, Gary Moshimer, Jill Mountain and Aliya Whiteley
Poetry by Vince Anello, Julia Colterjohn, Linda Delmonico Prussen, Justin Hyde, Steven Kunert, David LaBounty, Dave Morrison, Crisanta Pantoja, Kellie Powell, Jeri Rafter, Douglas Silver, Michelle Tandoc-Pichereau, Allison Tobey and Ami Vaughn
Reviews of Digging the Vein by Tony O’Neill and The Meter Is Running & We’re Almost Out Of Change by Ananda Selah Osel.
Plus, another installment of Your Main Readerman 4: Mad Libs Edition by Timmy Waldron
I played around with my calculator and came up with these Word Riot submission stats for April 2008:
Submissions: 195
Rejected: 144
Accepted: 25
Pending/Withdrawn/Jackie’s bad math: 26
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I updated a bunch of pages on this site, including Articles/Interviews, Now (which existed in a state of suspended animation for like a year), Readings, Reviews/Blurbs and Writing.
Also, all posted news on The Suburban Swindle has been tagged and has it’s own page here.
I did a couple interviews that recently got posted:
Also, I went to the KGB Bar on Friday night and caught the tail end of this reading. I met Tony O’Neill, Lee Rourke, Mikael Covey and Mark Edmund Doten for the first time. There were drinks. There was writer talk. There was Mars Bar. Covey did a write up of the evening over at Lit Up Magazine.
Word Riot has four stories shortlisted in this year’s storySouth Million Writers Award:
The Million Writers Award is probably the best-known online writing award out there. I got to be one of the judges for the second year in a row. Rockin.
The list of notable stories will be whittled down to 10 and then go up for a poll vote.
Somebody created a Wikipedia entry for Word Riot. I find it bizarre and yet totally cool that somebody other than me would bother to put together an entry. Let’s see if the Wiki masters deem it worthy enough to stay up.
Every couple months I’ll poke around Alexa.org to check out the traffic rankings for Word Riot and other lit mags. Here’s some that I found:
McSweeney’s
60,392
Failbetter.com
537,359
3:AM Magazine
597,692
Identity Theory
597,767
Word Riot
872,701
Eyeshot.net
1,161,889
Pindeldyboz
1,318,959
Opium Magazine
1,523,411
Narrative Magazine
2,055,259
StorySouth
2,205,310
SmokeLong Quarterly
2,469,063
Hobart
2,869,260
Scott Boyan at Thinksimian collected raw data from the storySouth Million Writer’s Award and used it to rate online literary magazines. Word Riot came in sixth, which I guess is fitting since we’re coming into our sixth year. Another suspicious six and we’ll be the demonic journal of record.
This is the first time I’ve seen any sort of statistical approach to ranking online lit mags. I often wonder what exactly the place of online journals is in the larger literary community. In thirty years, how will the journals be remembered? Will they be remembered at all?
I didn’t start Word Riot with any larger plan in mind. I noticed this past year that writers submitting work to us were much more reverent in their approach to the magazine. It gave me some sort of ironic pleasure: not in the meglomaniacal now-you-finally-give-me-the-respect-I-deserve way, but in the are-you-kidding-me? -I-run-this-thing-on-my-couch-with-my-laptop kind of way. I think of Word Riot as more a fun hobby that gives back to the literary-minded than as any sort of serious endeavor. And I believe that attitude is what has helped this thing last six years and will help it last into the forseeable future.
Word Riot takes up just enough of my time to be a comfy rock in my life, but not enough to be a burden when life gets intense. Word Riot is just this wonderful constant for me. I know I’ll be asking how Word Riot will be remembered when it hits the 10-year mark. And I sincerely hope I’ll be asking the same question at a 20-year celebration.
When someone reviews a Word Riot story on StumbleUpon, that story’s page gets a bazillion hits. I haven’t seen anywhere near the same results with other bookmark-sharing sites.
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11,559 / 60,000 (19.3%) |
