Well it's been a little slow around here: I just got back from the Tin House Workshop, and Nat just left for a week of vacation, so we're sort of getting in and out of the office less nowadays. Nat tells me he went ahead and mailed out this fall's issue to our subscribers (institutions, other journals, and individuals), but he's having trouble with the mail merge system and the list of those who entered our contests. Turns out we're also having trouble with previous subscriptions not being recognized by our system (we use file maker?), so we're trying to deal with that as well.

I know Wade's been reading quite a lot, and Nat has some packets for me when he gets back into town this Thursday. We're still not accepting submissions until September 1st, and I apologize if you're one of those authors who has recently received a slip asking that you resubmit in the fall (I know that costs money).

If I have time, I might write up a brief review of Tin House, but I don't know.

Eventually, Wade suggested that we try to post some particulars (hints&tips) as to what we're looking for in submissions, from the cover letter to the stories/poems themselves. So that's in the works.

And a side note: I was going through some back issues because someone sent us a check and a request for one in particular, and I found an issue from 1995 (Volume 24, Number 1) that made me happy. Apparently, the staff was in the habit of naming issues: this one was called displacement, and in it then-fiction editors Scott Berg and Patricia Fuentes had printed a story by Gordon Lish called "Konkluding Labor of Herkules: A Fiction," which you can find in his collection Self-Imitation of Myself. I liked that collection, and so I was glad to see that we'd published one of those stories.