The best writing advice I ever received was a mere word: succinct. This idea shaped the birth of an online (and soon to print) literary journal devoted to short forms—nonfiction shorts, flash fiction, and short poems under 750 words. Our little journal is reaching thousands of people, with a $0 marketing budget. How? I’ll tell you.
The hardest thing about starting a literary magazine is choosing a name. Really. Terse? Lean Lit? Succinct?! I searched available domain names. I asked my future editors. I consulted The Synonym Finder. Finally, I chose rawboned: the marrow of the story.
The easiest thing about starting a literary journal was choosing my editors. When they agreed to work with me, I knew we’d create something worth reading. I’m serious about my work. I don’t do anything if I can’t do it well. Working with the right people shapes the whole creative act.
Ginna Luck’s aesthetic is incredibly different from mine, and from Shelly’s and bevin’s—I absolutely need Ginna to balance us out. According to Ginna:
I love Trisha and what rawboned stands for: a commitment to literature and what it can provide, if ever so little, to not only us here at Rawboned but to the writers appearing in each issue and then hopefully to a larger community of writers and lovers of reading. How could I not support that?
Rawboned is also a publication that calls for a certain type of writing, as one of my teachers once described as dangerous, not in the sense that it is hurtful or damaging in any way, but in that it explores a thought, feeling, emotion, a place in time that is often difficult for language, but is at the same time the very thing that needs to be said, eloquently, beautifully, in a way that transcends. This is my passion, this type of writing, so I am here as a writer and reader supporting the stories that to me are the gems of the literary world and then delightfully giving them a platform.
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Shelly Weathers is an accomplished short story writer and has clear and eager editing eyes. She edits fiction, and more. Sometimes I wonder why she puts up with me. She answered:
I have read a lot of opinion pieces lately that suggest there are a glut of writing programs, a glut of writers (implying, therefore, a glut of people who only think they are writers), a glut of small literary journals, a glut of art that isn’t Art, of letters that are not Canon. I see this all differently.
There is a glut of violence, a glut of racism, a glut of poverty, a glut of selfishness, a glut of cultural and personal narcissism, a glut of entitlement, a glut of apathy, a glut of nihilism, a glut of viruses and anti-biotic resistant bacteria, a glut of cancer, a glut of exclusionary thinking, a glut of positionism in the arts, as in, a glut of individuals who proclaim their position in the arts community entitles them to exclude, to insult, to belittle, to disregard, to disenfranchise.
I started to work and continue to work on rawboned because I believe profoundly and committedly in the intention to connect people searching for meaning with writing and art that might begin to meet that search, answer that need, and then provoke a hunger for more art, more literature, more meaning.
I have never felt that it was or is necessary to achieve a certain glossiness. We are down in the trenches with the people who want to make content and see content. This is good work. I love our submitters, including the ones we have to reject for whatever reason. And finally, I love rawboned, because it was an idea, a hope that it could be and then it was. Actualization is the force that makes art relevant, not title, not award, not glittery associations.
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bevin is a force, an almost frightening creative pulse that is not definable. She is incredibly discerning and articulate. She is not literarily corruptible. She edits poetry. And she doesn’t like capital letters. (Live with it.) From bevin:
when trisha asked me to be a part of rawboned, there was no way to say no. because i knew it would be badass. because trisha is badass.
in my own work, i have been accused of using “a barest economy of words,” and that i “luxuriate in precision,” and that my words are like “ashes—what is left behind after burning everything down.” so this idea, rawboned, matched my instinctual sensibility.
i can’t say exactly why i can’t stand wasted words, but i can’t. obviously life is art, and making art, living life, is, at best, alchemical—and everything in the alchemical process seems to me to pivot around the stage of distillation.
what i want people to understand about short forms is that they are not pieces of something larger. a good nine line poem, or short short, should contain everything a great novel does.
maybe i believe that words are like resources, and one should only take exactly what
they need for the purpose of returning their images to the world. maybe i believe that just in eating the marrow, one could go to sleep and dream the whole animal from which it came.
Distillation. That is what we all do—Ginna writes poems that could be stories, and stories that could be poems; Shelly can crack your skull with her flash fiction; bevin writes novels that look like poems; I write 500 word narrative nonfiction sucker punches—and what we publish in rawboned. We are tough writers. We are tough editors. But we read every single piece that is submitted to our little lit rag, and we are honored to do so.
If you’re up for it, send us some work.
Trisha Winn is a MFAW graduate of Goddard (Port Townsend). She is the Founding Publisher and Editor-In-Chief of rawboned.org.