We’re about at the halfway point in putting out our next issue, so we thought it would be a good time to catch everyone up on what we’ve been doing and share some of our plans for the immediate future. It’s been a while since our last update, so we’ll first rewind to last September. We threw a party in collaboration with Canteen Magazine at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn, where Ben Schwartz, author of That Thing with the Dog, one of our favorites from our Spring 2012 issue, participated in Canteen’s Outwrite contest and beat both of his opponents, one of whom was a writer from the New Yorker.
You can check out his winning piece here. After that, Vorhees, Starlight Girls and Devon rocked a crowd of some 200 lit lovers while they bought subscriptions, partied hard and enjoyed free booze generously provided by our sponsors, The Noble Experiment and Brooklyn Brewery.
Following the party, we concentrated on getting our 5th issue out. Assisting us this time around was Ronda Rutherford, who’s joined The Rag team in an editorial intern capacity a few months ago. Born and raised near Seattle, Ronda has spent the past many years uprooted from her home, teaching English in Japan and in rural France, earning a Masters in German Literature at UCLA, and now trying her hand at editing and marketing in Manhattan. Ronda helped with the editing of Issue 5 and is involved in the reading and selection process for this summer’s upcoming release.
Over the coming 6 months, other than continuing to work on Issue 6, we have some other plans. We hope to host another party while also looking for other ways to expand our distribution. To that end, we are looking to publish our favorite 8-10 stories from our first four quarterly releases in a print anthology. We plan on launching a Kickstarter campaign in the near future in hopes of obtaining funding for this. The goal is to get some additional money to the writers by paying them for the reprint, while expanding our market by getting The Rag in front of some eyeballs in local bookstores.
Thanks to everyone, both our faithful writers and subscribers. And we hope you continue to enjoy The Rag.
