Dear Identity Theory Readers,
At the start of lockdown, a friend texted that a party she was looking forward to had been canceled. I stared at the blue bubbles as I searched my brain for the correct response. ‘I’m sorry, what a shame, that sucks,’ something like that. What I thought was, Who gives a shit? I might be a bitch. It isn’t pandemic-specific; I’ve been chronically ill for 23 years and long before social distancing and stay-at-home orders, I scrolled through Twitter and Instagram every day, thinking Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, even about people I like.
Wait—put quote marks around that paragraph in your head because I didn’t write it. It’s the beginning of Diane Shipley’s essay “Knowledge of Missing Out,” new on the site this week.
Also this week, we finally published the long-awaited Mike Nagel Jamba Juice essay. Here’s Identity Theory fiction contributor Kyle Seibel’s take on Mike’s piece:
Read the whole essay: “Bobblehead” by Mike Nagel.
This week’s new short story comes from R. B. Miner, a veteran who writes fiction (like Kyle Seibel—hey that’s two Kyle Seibel references in one newsletter). It’s called “Ten Silver Cars.” Here’s a clip:
“Something about our proximity to such beautiful, forbidden things made us reverent, as though we hadn’t just been talking about the girl I was going to screw when I got home on mid-tour leave. It was hard to be reminded so tangibly that there were beautiful things in the world as sand whipped at the skin of my neck and the sun sucked all the water out of my body. When you might die, the idea of a woman was better in the abstract.
It might have been depressing, to have those girls—those little lights in the vast darkness of the war—drive away, might have kept us quiet and thoughtful for the rest of our shift, but the radio crackled to life.”
Read the rest of the story.
The Case of the Missing Corgi (Stickers)
Some of our staff members intended to bring corgi stickers to AWP, but they all experienced spells of misfortune that caused them to miss out on the event. I’ll try to make up for that next year, though AWP has never been my thing. Maybe I don’t know what I’m missing?
Anyway, we now have a ton of extra corgi stickers. I have some mailing to do.
If you’d like a sticker, respond to this email and I’ll try to set you up with one (or a few).
On a vaguely related note: We no longer charge for submissions, so donations are super helpful to keep us in corgi stickers. That said, we’re going to hit our Submittable free submission cap this month, so we’re going to be dark on Submittable toward the end of the month. There are a lot of vitriolic articles out there insinuating that lit mags are evil for charging submission fees, but the simple fact is Submittable does not allow us (and presumably most/all organizations that don’t pay them thousands of dollars per year) to provide unlimited free submissions on their platform. It’s not our choice to have to charge in order to keep our Submittable open. I understand the burden of paying submission fees and the frustration that comes from the pay-to-play system, but it’s simply not up to us—and the proliferation of articles that make lit mags out to be evil for charging a few dollars to process submissions is disheartening. That said, I am not going to re-open our Submittable paid submissions until they fix a critical issue I brought to their attention months ago, so for now, we don’t have a paid option, and our Submittable will be up and down based on submission volume.
Fortunately, Chill Subs appears to be launching a submission manager this summer. Go, them.
Anyway, happy St. Patrick’s Day! My sister’s last name used to be Fitzgerald, so that makes me…still totally not Irish. But I’ll try not to miss out on the celebration.
Oh wait, I forgot this week’s cartoon. Here you are—enjoy:
Thank you,
Matt Borondy (that’s a Hungarian name)
Publisher/EIC
Identity Theory
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