qarrtsiluni

Happy 2008! As usual with these bimonthly notes, we have several changes and additions here we’d like to tell you about. But we’re most excited about the new theme. Here’s how the guest editors describe it.

The world is full of hidden messages, real and imagined: the letter concealed in the stem of a pen, the meeting place coded into a newspaper ad, information sailors derive from the weather, destinies astrologers divine from the stars, art drawn on the walls of catacombs, the farmer who finds signs in the behavior of livestock, the teenager who hears joy or doom in the seemingly random order of radio songs, people speaking freely among strangers who don’t know their language, the vast distance between what is meant and what is said.

This issue of qarrtsiluni is interested in hidden messages: the ways they’re concealed, the moments they’re revealed. The “messages” we’ll collect for the issue can come in any form: poetry, story, painting, photograph, essay, fragment, memory, code, and, for the first time, film.

Does our world conceal a great secret, or is it always struggling to speak? What hidden messages have you found? What do you dream of finding? What messages have you concealed?

A hidden message is different from a secret: by definition, a message necessitates a recipient, an audience, a listener. In qarrtsiluni’s Hidden Messages issue, we want the qarrtsiluni community to become the discoverers and decoders of a new collection of hidden wisdom, confessions, beauty and truth.

The suggested word limit for text contributions is 2000 words this time. Contributions from visual artists are also encouraged, as mentioned, and we’ve expanded the range of media we publish to include audio and short film. See the How to Contribute page for more details.

We’ve moved the deadline for this issue from the middle of the second month to the end of the first: January 31. It’s possible that we’ll extend it, but please don’t count on that. We’re also now asking people to wait two weeks between submissions to a given theme. We want to keep the volume of submissions low enough that our volunteer editors don’t feel overwhelmed, and can give each submission the attention it deserves.

The editors for this issue are, as usual, past contributors, so they’re familiar with our general editorial style. Both are what the publishing industry likes to refer to as “emerging writers,” and both are from the American Midwest, relocated to opposite coasts. Dana Guthrie Martin lives and writes in the Seattle area, and has been a catalyst for several online and collaborative poetry projects. Her poetry has appeared in Fence and is forthcoming in Canopic Jar. Carey Wallace lives in New York, and is working on a new novel about the invention of the typewriter.

• You might have noticed that the links for Dana and Carey’s names above go to author tag pages local to qarrtsiluni. One of the trade-offs we make for the convenience and security of WordPress.com hosting is the annoyance of tag and category links at the ends of posts taking people off-site to global tag pages. Just within the past few days, however, we’ve finished adding author tags to all the posts in the archive, which has allowed us to redo the Index of Contributors so that each name there is hotlinked to a local tag page: a new page in qarrtsiluni containing all the posts from that contributor. So if you’ve been published here more than once, you now have a single link you can put in the sidebar of your blog or website, or anywhere else you want to share your publication credits.

We have a couple other new ways for people to spread the word about qarrtsiluni, detailed on the Cache page. (Dave can vouch for the quality of the white t-shirt, the ballcap, and the large mug.) Qarrtsiluni has a group page on Facebook that anyone can join. And we’ve added a news feed on Twitter that you can bookmark if you’d like to get these updates more often than once every two months. We include news about past contributors, so be sure to keep us informed of anything you think the readership should know about: a new book, a major literary award, or the like.

We’re grateful to be part of a vibrant and growing community of writers and artists on the web, and we hope you’ll continue to include qarrtsiluni among your regular online destinations this year. We wish you all a peaceful, joyous, and creative New Year.

—Dave Bonta and Beth Adams

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