Welcome to the August 2011 issue of Defenestration.

An interesting (and true!) story about editing this issue*. After I stitched all the stories, poems, photos, and biographies together into the standard layout, I printed out a copy. Apparently my wife had accidentally loaded up the printer with a bunch of discarded drafts of old Ben & Winslow strips**. So as I’m editing the issue, these light pencil sketches keep showing up behind the content, like the ghosts of cartoon characters. The first page of Lawrence Barker’s “A Stinking Rose by Any Other Name,” for example, contains a half-drawn Apsara Williams in a tank top, which I found fitting because the first paragraph uses the word “attention-whores.” Several other pages have faceless proto-Bens and proto-Winslows cavorting on them. One of the proto-Winslows was fondling his breasts.