qarrtsiluni

Qarrtsiluni offers electronic delivery of original poetry, prose, and art, organized into regular, themed issues, with a new post every weekday. You can find us wherever you go: email and IM, iTunes, feed readers, sometimes even print. The title comes from an Iñupiaq word that means “sitting together in the darkness, waiting for something to burst.”

Qarrtsiluni began publishing on September 20, 2005. Originally conceived of as a group blog with editors, to which contributors would send only their best work, it gradually took on a few more trappings of a regular literary and artistic e-zine, such as permanent managing editors and open submissions. However, we continue to strive for the freshness and continual publication pattern of a blog. Our issues are notional, with a new item going up almost every day accompanied by an audio version in podcast form. We have a full-content RSS feed, also available via email, and the podcast is available for free through the iTunes store. And beginning in 2009, our print division has been publishing poetry chapbooks as well.

The themed issue-periods fluctuate in length, but began to lengthen to three months apiece in the second half of 2008. Themes are chosen by the issue editors, who have sole discretion in deciding what to include. We publish a call for submissions describing the theme and laying out guidelines specific to the issue, and also send email notices to past contributors and other readers and supporters of qarrtsiluni. If you would like to receive these bi- or tri-monthly calls for submission from us, please join the qarrtsiluni news group on Google or the Facebook group. You can keep abreast of the latest developments with our news feed on Twitter or Identi.ca, or with the news blog on Tumblr.

Who are we, and what are we doing here?

As Managing Editors, Beth and Dave (see bios below) choose the theme editors — or step forward to edit a theme ourselves, handle day-to-day correspondence, send out email updates, and manage the site. Neither of us has published our own work here since we formalized our role in July 2006. Though we may not have agreed 100 percent with every decision made by every theme editor, we believe that encouraging a diversity of styles and tastes is more important than conformity to a single artistic vision.

Our primary mission is to build an online literary community that remains open to inspired amateurs as well as to seasoned, full-time writers. We are proud to have published a number of original works by well-established artists and writers, but we are equally pleased to showcase the works of beginners and of part-time writers for whom the demands of work or family have precluded a single-minded focus on creative work. Many of our contributors are active bloggers, and we conceive it as part of our mission to help foster the appreciation of blogs as a medium for literary expression. We feel that personal weblogs constitute a new literary genre in their own right (albeit one with ties to traditional forms of hupomnemata), and we think their authors should be encouraged to challenge blogging’s ephemeral reputation and write as if every word counted. We link prominently to the blogs or websites of all contributors who have them, both in the index and in the author bios.

We encourage contributors to submit work to every issue, if they want — regular contributors give qarrtsiluni a more homey, welcoming feel, we think. We’re especially interested in fostering dialogue between artists and writers (see the Ekphrasis issue for some explicit examples) and creative collaboration generally (see our mammoth Mutating the Signature issue). The multiple opportunites for interaction among authors and between author and audience are really what distinguish literary publication on the web from all previous genres. The name of the magazine is no joke. Ideas might come to individuals, but they are born of communion.

Managing Editors

Beth Adams, writer, graphic designer, and social activist, started The Cassandra Pages to save her sanity after years of sadly correct political prophecy. A longtime resident of central New York State and Vermont, she and her husband recently moved to the peaceable kingdom of Montréal. Her prose and poetry have appeared in venues from The Witness to Tikkun, and in June 2006 her book Going to Heaven: The Life and Election of Bishop Gene Robinson, was published by indie NY publisher Soft Skull Press. She’s a member of the Québec Writer’s Federation and PEN Canada. In her spare time, she plays classical piano, sketches and paints. (View her artwork on Flickr.)

In an essay at her personal blog, Beth defended the blog form for the way it can reflect “the sense of myself as a moving, mutable being who exists in inner and outer worlds that are also in states of constant change.”

Dave Bonta is official poet-in-residence, personal chef and general dogsbody at the Plummer’s Hollow Nature Reserve in Central Pennsylvania. Born in 1966, he is just three years older than the Internet. He began writing poetry at the age of seven, and has had poems published in such diverse places as Art Times, Birdwatchers’ Digest, Frogpond, Pivot, Studies in Contemporary Satire, The Sun, and Wind. His chapbook, Odes to Tools, was published by Phoenicia Publishing in January 2009. He has been blogging at Via Negativa since 2003. Other online projects include a daily microblog, The Morning Porch, a photoblog, and a site called Moving Poems that aims to showcase the best videopoetry on the web.

Dave wrote a guest post for Blogging Blog on Blogs as a medium for online literary magazines: lessons from qarrtsiluni.

Dave and Beth at a meet-up on October 4, 2009, upstate NY (photo by Jonathan Sa'adah)

This is a really fresh and lively ezine in blog format, with a high quality of contributions and a sense of a collective life in it. —Great Works

I had great fun being published in qarrtsiluni — from the swift turnaround on submissions, to the gracious communications from you and the guest editors en route, to the comments and emails I received from your diverse, enthusiastic readers. I find it wonderful that you have managed to create a community around a journal, a generous and open community. You’ve got your doors and windows open and you let all the breezes circulate. —Rosemary Starace (via email)

Dave and Beth – I just wanted to pass on a thanks for the fact that Qaartsiluni and both of you have opened up for me a whole network of reflective and earnest bloggers, inquirers, writers, and photographers who value and are as entranced by the natural world as I am. I just didn’t know they were there. —Allan Peterson (via email)