(Cover Art by: Mihai Coman)
In March of 2009, I went to Nico's Recovery Room, in an ambiguous location in Pittsburgh, with my friends/ grad school colleagues. We went in for a beer and found a bar filled with characters. One man that stands out in my memory was wearing a large American flag baseball cap; the hat sat somewhat crookedly on his head, and tufts of hair shot out. As we walked from the bar area to the area with booths, non-fiction editor, Amy Holwerda, swears she heard a drunk woman lean over to her husband and say, "Honey, she looks like a librarian..." as I passed by. I was flattered to be considered anything but a broke grad student. That evening turned night, we all,Amy, Sarah, and I, sat in a green ripped up booth, and decided we wanted to create a literary magazine. Amazingly three years have passed since then, and we've stuck together, and maintained the same passion we started out with -- our poetry editor, Athena Pappas, who later joined us, adds to that passion.
With the Spring 2012 issue, our roots, once created in a hole in the wall, remain. We do have a tree logo after all... making it hard for roots to change, yet we've grown, and we have reached out from our original mission of publishing work that explores the world of "the other side of the tracks" in a hypothetical sense to work that explores the other side of the world, the other side of love, the other side of strangers, the other side of language. This issue strikes me as an issue that has both international and national focuses. We've added a visual art component to the magazine, and our first featured artist is photographer, Mihai Coman, whose work explores a cross-cultural perspective. Poetry features Kimberly Brown, Alissa Fleck, Steven Good, Richard Peabody, John McKernan, and Maressa Whitehead. Fiction features Anne Fowler, Ellen Mcgrath Smith, Vincent Rendoni, and Alex Reisler. Non-fiction features Robert Isenberg. Fiction Editor and Designer, Sarah Grubb, has outdone herself on putting together this one, go ahead, see for yourself. READ IT!
