More Hype Please

PERSISTENT LABYRINTHS

... analogue anecdotes to the digital morass

More hype is what I tell myself. Hype, hype, hype seems the name of the game. That vapid dazzling jibber-jabber that hogs mind space and air waves. I have never been good at it, but if you run a literary magazine nowadays, hype is necessary. Tweet, tweet. Excellent writing is not enough. Emily Dickinson and Vincent Van Gogh are proof talent must be promoted. There are not a lot of litmag editors who can sell narrative and poetry like it's fabulous and urgent as a Bentley or a BMW, and must be had like hot sex. Alas, the same rules apply to selling literary magazines as they do to cars. Hype counts and so does craftsmanship, but put them both together and you have something worthwhile.

I am learning to tweet, blog, and post to facebook to celebrate and promote good writing because there is so much talent in this issue it makes my head spin. This issue as we see it explores "persistent labyrinths" that vex us as we wind our way through life. Lisa Dierbeck's chapter from The Autobiography of Jenny X is . . . well . . . the senator's son is preying upon a girl who has found refuge at one of his mother's charity causes -- The Second Chance Society. A girl named Jenny who has this to say to her new found lover, “Great. Lucky me,” Jenny said. “I fuck the Senator’s son on Fifth

Avenue and he asks me for financial aid.” Pathos flourishes throughout. Here is where you buy the novel a http://www.orbooks.com/our-books/jennyx. Dale Peck's dark comic tale Not Even Camping Is Like Camping Anymore explores stuff that makes me squeamish -- a gay Lolita with a little Faulkner on the side. I had to read twice before I got it. We published two stories of Jerome Edwards. one of them, The Places you Find Yourself starts out: "You walked out of the shitter one morning and kicked an armoire. You didn’t know what an armoire was before you met her. Now you

know how she takes her coffee, that she hates the word moist, and that

she’ll read anything being made into a major motion picture." It delivers a ticklish labyrinth that is not so funny after all. And Sarah Carson's poems are just how I feel on those days when things don't add up. This is from her poem

When a Man Flies

Tonight there are nine houses burning in the city where

I was born. Last night there were eleven. The night

before—thirteen.

The firefighters left town weeks ago. . .

Lindsay Merbaum's The Summerhouse is an exceptional story that peels back the layers of our perception of relationships, love and self-discovery. I have already read it twice and I still want to read again.

Epiphany continues its earmark of giving writers lots of space: another two chapter installment from A.B. Meyer's Keep This Fortune where she locates her birth mother. Her prose is precise in unearthing the sentimentality of her pain about being adopted.

Truth be told I'd rather have a copy of Epiphany than a Bentley. No Lying.