Changes at The Collagist
August 23, 2013 § Leave a comment
Matt Bell ends his tenure as editor of The Collagist with an exclamation point of an issue as Gabriel Blackwell and Matthew Olzmann are set to take over as co-editors-in-chief.
For the Fiction section Bell invited past contributors to the magazine to submit new work, and so Issue Forty-Nine contains stories by Brian Evenson, Tina May Hall, Robert Kloss, Sarah Norek, Amanda Goldblatt, Brian Kubarycz, Evelyn Hampton, David Hollander, Amber Sparks, Robert Lopez, Kate Petersen, Jonathan Callahan, and Kate Wyer, as well as the usual rich selection of poetry, nonfiction, novel excepts, and book reviews.
I have always liked The Collagist for getting right what many electronic lit journals do not: the value of selection. It has a clean design that segregates out each month a handful of stories, poems, reviews and essays that are chosen not just for their merit but for how they fit with each other. The issue then becomes a product of its own, as opposed to a continuing aggregate that isn’t much different from a blog.
Three stories I’ve got bookmarked from The Collagist are Tessa Mellas’ “Dye Job,” from Issue Forty-Four; Sarah Malone’s “Bridal Discount,” from Issue Thirty-Six; and Tara Laskowski’s “The Etiquette of Arson,” from Issue Thirty-Three.
Neil Serven 
Leave a Reply