When I first began thinking of starting a magazine in late 2012, I had no idea what I was in for. I thought that you put out a call for submissions, and people submitted, and you plucked the best work from the top of the stack. Then you published that really good work, and people got wind that you published really good stuff, and thousands of people flocked to read your journal, and the thousands multiplied into tens of thousands, and then people basically started throwing money at you. I’m exaggerating a little but not much. What I discovered is that publishing good work—finding it, and getting people to read that—is really hard work. Nobody throws money at you; like writing, nobody calls to check if you are okay if you don’t show up. And it’s hard, when you’re completely unknown, to find good writers. Thankfully, that got easier over the past few years. Since we began The Collapsar we’ve had the opportunity to publish original writing by some really fantastic writers: Wendy C. Ortiz, Gabriel Blackwell, Elisa Gabbert, Amorak Huey, Steve Edwards, Amber Sparks, Juliet Escoria, to name just a very few.
But over the past year, trying to make it out there in the world with a family and a heavy teaching load, I’ve realized it’s time for me to step aside, if The Collapsar is going to continue to grow and change. Our founding associate editor and culture editor, James Brubaker, is also stepping aside in order to become the editor of the Southeast Missouri State University Press. I love what we’ve done from the start of this thing, and I’m proud of it: we’ve tried to publish the best and most diverse work we could. We’ve been a number of writer’s first publications. The weird and the strange have often been our calling card. Personally, I’ve met more people, in doing this, than I ever imagined.
We’re leaving you, dear reader, in good hands. Susannah Clark, our managing editor, and Lena Moses-Schmitt, our poetry editor, will be co-editing the magazine going forward. They’ll both be at AWP this weekend, so you should say hi to them (we’ll have a table!).
There will be a brief pause until somewhere around the middle of the spring, and then The Collapsar will be back at it.
If you have an outstanding submission with us—and to say that some of you have been waiting a ridiculously long time is an understatement—sorry for the wait! Your submission will be responded to!
Thanks for reading and encouraging us for the past few years. It’s meant a lot to me.
Nathan Knapp February 7, 2017
