The PRACTICE Debut
PRACTICE: NEW WRITING + ART issue one is still available. Get a copy while you can.
The first issue includes:
Poetry by Dan Beachy-Quick, G.C. Waldrep & John Cross, Graham Foust, Eleanor Graves, Christi Kramer, H.L. Hix, Janet Holmes, Aaron McCollough, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Rod Smith, Peter Streckfus, Cole Swensen, Susan Tichy, Caroline Walker, and Joan Wilcox.
Prose by Betsy Andrews, Jamy Bond, Gerald Tiffany, and Gabe Weisert. An interview with Semezdin Mehmedinovic by Brian Brodeur.
Art and photography by Karen Barbour, Angela Buenning, Paula McCartney, Ryan Mrozowski, and Anne Wilson.
(If you e-mailed a freebie request prior to this posting, you will receive one.)
We received a tremendous amount of kind and excellent feedback for issue one (including an award for design excellence from Mohawk Paper company). Alas, we haven't yet asked any of our new friends if we may quote them on this site, and so -- we're going to do it anyway. We've eliminated names to protect the innocent but will credit people once they've allowed it. Here is some of the feedback:
"I think it's the most beautiful journal I've ever seen." - excellent poet with hyphenated last name (you'd know it if we used it here).
"I'm very glad to have stumbled into this particular gravitational pull." - professor and director of certain amazing and well-thought-of Books Arts program in the SF Bay Area.
"Both a beautiful object, and shrewdly edited..." - Josh Corey, on his blog.
"I find patient editorial intelligence here, composed and improvisatory--rare qualities for a journal just starting out." - anonymous, but clearly brilliant.
Here is what we said last year, at time of debut:
The word PRACTICE brings to mind notions of craft. Writers and artists and photographers are skilled practitioners of craft, and magazines such as this one celebrate this fact in all of its beauty and diversity. This is all true. But what we also had in mind when we settled on the title was Reading, which is its own form of practice. We want more readers. We like to believe that more people should experience this interesting and worthwhile work -- we'd even venture to say that outside of academia more people want the chance to "understand" it -- and so we are trying to create a publication that immediately addresses the issue, these issues. For one small example, most contributors are provided the chance to introduce themselves or their work in a dedicated page at the start of their "section." These artist statements vary greatly (no constraints except in word count) and first feedback tells us that they are helpful to folks who might be arriving at this type of work for the first time. We also mix "traditional" prose (tending to an international focus, though not exclusively) with "innovative" poetry (awkward labels) because both offer a form of travel that we enjoy. We also believe that the disciplines belong together, and that readers who are drawn into the publication through more familiar essays will likely stick around for the challenging stuff -- especially if there are signposts along the way. You might fairly argue that none of this is particularly original. Even so, we wanted to let you know what we have in mind. When we say PRACTICE, we also mean reading. (And tea, but that's another story.)
