I never thought about being an editor until I became a short fiction reader.
That is to say, in the past couple of years, I have spent countless hours reading literary magazines, both online and in print, something I had never done before.
At heart, I’ve always been a hardcore novel reader. Back in 2006, I could count on two hands the number of short story collections I had fully read (Amy Hempel, Joyce, Philip K. Dick, Dennis Johnson, Bret Easton Ellis. Welp, that’s about it.)
Compare that to the several hundred novels under my belt. Shameful.
It was never a pretentious thing, I never believed novels were better or deeper in any way than short fiction. One page of Hempel is worth more than the entire Lord Of The Rings series to me. But it was just something that I accepted – most of the fiction I would digest would come to me in its longer form, the same way I’ve seen a ridiculously high amount of movies, but probably less than thirty short movies. The same way I buy entire albums and listen to them through and through, and rarely go for one single song.
Until three years ago, when writer friends told me, hey, check that out.
Dogmatika is how it began. From there, I devoured 3 am magazine, Bomb, Nerve, BUST DOWN THE DOOR AND EAT ALL THE CHICKENS, Clarkesworld magazine, 365tomorrows, the list goes on and on. One magazine would invariably lead to another. Short stories kept hitting me hard. I bought more collections and anthologies. Craig Davidson’s Rust And Bone was the one thing that completely destroyed me. Without realizing it, I was falling more and more in love with short stories.
Cut and fast forward to quitting my job, to getting published here and there, to life being fucked up then getting better, to right here and now.
My dear friend Christopher Dwyer and I have started our own literary magazine.
I can’t say how thankful and excited I am to do this with the man. Over the past couple of years, we’ve developed a strong friendship, entirely via emails and one-upping each other through our stories.
Over the summer, while working on my own babies, I realized I wanted to read more, more, always more, and I wanted to spread that hard hitting feeling I kept getting from reading the works of complete strangers. So here it is. Rotten Leaves magazine. As ironic as it might be coming from someone who never dwelled too much on short fiction, the name ROTTEN LEAVES comes from a collection of short stories I compiled when I was roughly twenty. Stories no one has ever read – dark stories, naive stories, science fiction and horror and a fairytale, too. They were experiments, from back when I was reading Camus and didn’t know who the fuck Gabriel García Márquez or Cormac Mc Carthy were, back when the words “acts”, “inciting incident” or “conflict” didn’t mean much to me. Rotten Leaves is the name I threw to Dwyer when we were looking for one, and we both went for it.
I hope the best for this freshly spawned monster. I hope Dwyer and myself will stumble upon stories that will claw at our ribcages, so that we can share them, both online and in print, with readers across the globe. I hope that through reading day after day, I will become a better writer. And above all, I hope the readers will follow us down this dark path, and as they read our magazine, they will find stories they will remember for years to come.
http://www.rottenleaves.com
http://www.facebook.com/rottenleaves
http://www.twitter.com/rottenleaves