Our Mission

Our goal is to create a quality, affordable and sustainable literary magazine. We do have other lofty aspirations. We want to reinvigorate the short story form and bring the literary magazine back into the entertainment market. There was a time when writing short fiction was a sustainable profession. Writers like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Bukowski and Vonnegut all got their start publishing short stories, and short story writing was not only a gateway to literary success, but a means of success in itself. When Fitzgerald was broke, he’d pen another short story. Any old rag would publish a short story and pay the author for it.

 

So now, we have The Rag. We see electronic publishing as an opportunity. It lets us distribute our magazine for a reasonable price, while still allowing us to pay our authors for their hard work—in other words, new technology has allowed us to turn back time to an era of affordable distribution and open competition.

 

It’s easy for good writing to get lost in the muck of Internet publishing. Many of the existing online magazines aim for quantity over quality. They throw the muck at the wall and hope some sticks. Which is fine and has its place, but that’s not the way we operate. The Rag aims to bring a print aesthetic to the digital world. In other words, we have standards. We edit our stories. We design a good-looking magazine. We want publication in The Rag to mean something to our authors, and we want our readers to trust that they’ll get only the best writing out there.

 

What kind of writing do we like?

These days, with skyrocketing costs of print publication on one side, and the wilderness of Internet publication on the other, it seems the shorts stories that do get published appeal to an increasingly niche market. Picture a middle-aged man—he has a beard, he’s smoking a pipe, his gut looks like it’s about to burst out of his sweater—and he’s reading a literary magazine. He guffaws loudly, plucks his pipe out of his mouth, shakes his head admiringly and says, “Oh my, what a finely constructed simile.” Right there: that’s the audience. That guy would hopefully still enjoy the stories in The Rag, we do after all appreciate a good simile, but it’s not always just about technique. The story needs to entertain in some fashion. We can forgive writing that may be a little rough around the edges if the story had some bite to it. Rough edges aren’t difficult to smooth out, and the bite remains. We like gritty stories, stories that are psychologically believable and stories that have some humor in them, dark or otherwise. We like subtle themes, original characters and sharp wit.

So, what are you waiting for, try out The Rag.