Ten years, you guys. This October, Defenestration will be ten years old!
Have any of you ever read slush? Have you ever read slush for ten years straight? After so long a time, Eileen’s lucky to still have her sanity, and I’m lucky to still have my sanity and my rakish good looks. But the slush is wearing us down, and we’re quickly becoming editors on the edge. We don’t sleep well. We don’t eat well. Our nerves have been rubbed raw. I have literally—literally—seen Eileen turn into a Tyrannosaurus over seemingly insignificant things. The other day she almost leveled an IHOP after finding an uneven distribution of blueberries in her blueberry pancakes. This sort of destruction cannot continue no matter how awesome and no matter how many views the resulting videos on YouTube attain.
So to celebrate Defenestration’s decade of existence, Eileen and I are taking a break from the slush pile. What does this mean for you? For starters, we won’t have a December issue this year (tears!), and we won’t reopen to poetry and short story submissions until December 20th (more tears!). We’re also closing to nonfiction and fake nonfiction until December 20th (we ran out of tears long ago!). The only thing we’re remaining open to are visual submissions. So if you have comics or funny pictures you’d like us to publish, feel free to send those our way, but hold off on anything else!
The Defenestration Crew will still be tinkering behind the scenes. New nonfiction and fake nonfiction will continue to appear through October (and maybe beyond). If you’ve sent a nonfiction or fake nonfiction sub to us recently, we’ll have a response for you soon. Also, Ben & Winslow will continue to appear every Friday as usual.
On December 20th, we’ll open the floodgates once more and start preparing for our April 2014 issue. We’re going to turn this magazine up to 11. And beyond.
As for this issue? I don’t want to oversell it, you guys… but it’s pretty damn awesome. We have a really solid mix of styles and genres. Letters from starfish? Vampire boyfriends? Ronald Reagan? Mr. Ed? BOXES?! These were all things you were asking for, and we’ve delivered them, my good people. We’ve delivered. Check out the content via the links below, or download the PDF.
Winter is coming. We’ll see you then…
—Andrew Kaye, Editor-in-Chief
Poetry:
Eric K. Auld, “Lesser Known Literary Cocktails”
Katie Seeley, “A Pinteress’ Someday”
Mikaela von Kursell, “The Box”
Jordan Moffatt, “What We Are”
Anna Della Zazzera, “The end of my vampire boyfriend”
Short Stories:
Brittany Shutts, “Millionaire’s Bestiary”
Saikat Sen, “The First Day of the Rest of Our Lives”
Rory Fleming, “New World Love”
Kelly Kiehl, “Construction”
Matt Kolbet, “A Letter from a Starfish”
Tom Mitchell, “Surprised Baby”
Michael Andreoni, “Memories of Mr. Ed”
Downloadable Copy: