The literary journal is a complicated gesture. It is an archive, a necessary ephemera, of movement, aesthetic, reaction, and change, but it is also a quicksand of these things; in its fleeting multitudes, we can barely keep track. Some are, from a scattering of watchtowers, and we are grateful to them for their compulsion, because it must be a compulsion to keep the thousands of us in sight.
But whether we see them or not, literary journals are the bricks beneath our communities, beneath our readings and publishing houses. In their very gathering of us, they are our starting points and the proof of our existence as we try to make books and be invited to festivals—and maybe we never reach any of these things but at least our name appeared, our poem or story came out in print once, that once we were writers.
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