Great News...and a Plug

A few months ago, Dan Wickett posted some news about a new literary magazine, Avery: An Anthology of New Fiction, and how they’d just received their non-profit status. I clicked a few links--to Avery’s website and their blog --and was pretty impressed by the crew running it. (Honestly, I think it’s great when anybody decides to take the time and effort to put out a literary magazine. It’s a lot of work, and the people who endeavor to do such a thing pretty much know they aren’t going to become rich and famous from the enterprise). The editors of Avery, though--Stephanie Fiorelli, Adam Koehler, and Andrew Palmer--had a vision for what they wanted to do that in addition to being noble I thought was very cool: They wanted to put out a book, an anthology, of new fiction. And they wanted to put some real effort into the book’s production, which they discussed on the blog every now and then.

My immediate reaction upon being so impressed with what they were doing was to write a blog post about them, but I put that on hold for a little while (two months or so) because I wanted to send them a story first. My thought was, I’ll send them something, wait to see what happens, and then once I get a response--whether positive or negative--I’d use this blog to promote the thing. (And, seriously, my plan was to do what I could to let the people who read this blog know about the thing either way, whether I was going to be a part of Avery or not).

The good news, though, is that my story “Tell Everyone I Said Hi” will be appearing in Avery’s inaugural issue, alongside stories by Stephen Dixon, Ander Monson, Dean Bakopoulos, and a small host of new and emerging writers. I am, as you can imagine, utterly thrilled.

And now, here’s the plug:

Avery held a fundraiser recently to help support their first issue, and while the event was pretty successful (based on what I read about it) they came up a little short in the money department. They’re going to be able to release the magazine with their vision for it pretty much still intact, but they want to be able to print more than 300 copies of the issue, and to do that, they’re going to need the cash. So, if you feel like dropping by their site and ordering a subscription, or just donating them some money in an effort to say, “Hey, I like stories, and I think what you’re doing is way cool,” then, thanks to that non-profit status Dan wrote about, I’m pretty sure you can write it all off on your taxes. Plus, it’s not like your money is going to put shoes on their feet. It’ll merely give them an opportunity to get what I’m guessing is going to be a fine collection of stories into the hands of more people. Which is why, right now, I don’t feel too dirty in my efforts to try and send a few of you their way.