Issue No. 7, 2013-14. Editor’s Notes

This year’s edition of West 10th is difficult to sum up. It is not bound by any large theme. Each piece bears its own strange subject matter and has arrived here from a different place. These pieces are not only sharing a physical space with one another, they are engaged in a brief conversation. They echo each other and refute each other, disagree on some points and agree with resounding enthusiasm on others. Their conversation is like one you might overhear—on the street or between friends or in line at the drugstore— fragmentary but clear, part of some bigger scope. And often funny, too.

The pieces here are the ones that generated the most conversation among us. Our own conversation about them (and their conversation) started in our meetings, spilled over into our email correspondences and filled up a few Excel spreadsheets. I remember sending a Facebook message via an iPad about a poem, which is the most technologically com- plicated thing I can think of. All this to say that our conversation unfolded unpredictably, and through many different modes of communication. Two of the pieces that we talked about often are the recipients of the 2014 Editors’ Awards: Jade Conlee’s poem, “Fluxx,” and Emma Wren’s prose piece, “Murder at the Turtle Pageant.”

The people who have made this year’s issue possible deserve more thanks than I can fit on this page. Our managing editor, Rose Howell, approached every step of the long editing process with energy and an excellent eye. Each member of the three editorial boards provided invaluable opinions, and helped maintain the conversation I keep mentioning.

I would also like to thank April Naoko Heck and Joanna Yas and for their guidance and support, and Aaron Petrovich for seeing us through the layout process. A big thank you to Darin Strauss and Matthew Rohrer for making the tough decisions of selecting the Editors’ Award recipients. We are grateful to Tao Lin for having a long conversation with us, and to Matthew Dickman for generously giving us three of his poems. Thank you to every writer and artist who submitted this year. Thank you, of course, to you for reading.

Maeve Nolan

Masthead

EDITOR IN CHIEF

Maeve Nolan

MANAGING EDITOR

Naomi Rose Howell

POETRY EDITORS

Jarry Lee
Joe Masco
Eric Stiefel

PROSE EDITOR

Michelle Ling
Ben Miller

ASSISTANT POETRY EDITORS

Anna Beckerman
Kenneth Lim
Rebecca Pecaut
Michael Valinsky

ASSISTANT PROSE EDITORS

Mina Hamedi
Louis Loftus
Patrick Morley
Manuela Silvestre