MANIFEST
| DEAR NAVIGATOR : :
BEGIN There are lots and lots of journals dedicated to current writing—to prose poetry, microfiction, plays wrought about dead soul singers and living serial killers, opera and pantomimes, stories about prophecy and in between states, epistles masquerading as satire masquerading as self-help, series of sonnets dedicated to the interlocutors of William James, and even (shouted aloud) the occasional abecedarium. The entire field has experienced a revolutionary transition. There are audiences for all wonder of things and many of them exist in smaller pockets, a series of imaginary geographies that actualize around readings and broadsheets, small press publications, blogs and journals which dot the landscape of the web. Increasingly driven by the pressures of the electronic, writing at the interstices of innovation and tradition has taken on, rejected, usurped, altered, and informed its various practices as part of this changing current. Considering all of this in light of new mediums within contemporary art—which have undergone their own transformations, spurred on by acknowledgment and manipulations of the digital—we’ve arrived a strange new place that’s been around for a strange little while (an inconvenient forever?) in which the kind of things we wish to imagine through language might be able to be viewed with our own blinking eyes. When corrections are received all charts are corrected in the ship’s folio and then recorded— Inspired by print and online journals such as Cabinet, Chicago Review, Trickhouse, and Octopus, Dear Navigator desires to create a forum for innovative writing that works as art object, critical opus, interdisciplinary essay, poetic form, and more plaintively, communication to the world. No longer teaching the navigators how to do celestial navigation— From the mind of one to another, we continue to work with these directions: shared through the medium of a quarterly electronic journal, we aim to engage the open space of its electronic form as the maker sees fit, traditionally or less traditionally, as well as publish a handful of established and up-and-coming writers per issue. The nature of waterways described by any given nautical publication changes regularly— We look forward to sharing our words with you and to receiving your transmissions— Please send information on tides and currents, local details of the Earth’s magnetic field, restricted flying areas, and man-made structures such as harbors, buildings, and bridges. END |
EDITOR Elizabeth Metzger Sampson CURATOR AND CONTENT EDITOR EDITOR-AT-LARGE ASSOCIATE EDITORS SPIRITUAL GUIDE Sarah Archer EDITORIAL BOARD Dan Beachy-Quick, Kenneth Goldsmith, Matthea Harvey, Yusef Komunyakaa, W. Martin, Peter Orner, Vanessa Place, Patricia Smith, Brian Kim Stefans, Saviana Stanescu, Cole Swenson CONTACT wprogr [at] saic.edu SITE DESIGN Veronica Corzo-Duchardt / winterbureau |
