TOGETHER NOW Welcome to Issue 3.

Gentle Viewers,

A publication is an episodic narrative. It is more on the order of a television drama than, say, a variety show or feature film. The cast of characters rotates, yet some remain throughout. Plot threads originate, stretch, dissipate, return over issues, invert themselves, twisting and renewing. It has not been long for us but I have been here a long time. I have been alone for the most part, joined via e-mail or drop-ins by those generous enough to share their fine work.

Now, that will change. Joe Collins, whose excellent story “Jeffrey the Whale and the Theory of Awesome” was published in Issue No. 1, will be joining me here at Arrow HQ as assistant editor and social media manager. (You can follow us on Twitter here.) This has all grown too big for just one person, and oh how glad I am for that, and the capable and careful company it brings.

This issue is our largest yet, clocking in with 25 contributors. This has to do, in part, with our folio assignment this issue, TOGETHER NOW, which asked writers and artists to offer collaborative projects. Tamiko Beyer and Soham Patel offer a poem written on two different typewriters in two different states, while Jeremy Allan Hawkins and Brian Oliu sent e-mails to make prose across the Atlantic Ocean. Lauren Bender, Theresa Columbus and Megan McShea sat together to fill a single page with words. Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney are old hands, having used e-mail and a formal constraint to make together-work since 2006, while Teseleanu George and Hector Pineda literalized collaboration by making two collages. And last but not least, our inaugural audio contributors, newly marrieds Seth McKelvey and Chelsea Rice used response improvisation to combine poetry and piano. (Congrats, guys!)

Returning guest stars Becca Klaver, Chris Dennis, Phil Estes and MC Hyland – known best to us from their breathless words in Issue No. 2 – unite to talk about the happy and strange proportions of collaboration in our second CONVERSATION.

This, of course, is to say nothing of the sweetly daring, brisk and dangerously awesome work of J.A. Tyler, John Bradley, Feng Sun Chen, J. A. Gaye, Caroline Klocksiem, Sophia Kraemer-Dahlin, Dolly Lemke, Ben Nardolilli, Nick Ripatrazone, Sean Thibodeau, Bill Nace and Amelia Colette Jones. Each piece is a universe or polaroid unto itself, gesturing to the big things, meditating on the minute, getting at texture and experiment in some of our favorite ways.

As onward we journey into our second year of publishing, new developments have risen from the writer’s room. Behold: our Submishmash-authored submissions manager, maw open and ready. Behold: new e-mail addresses. Behold: the assignment for Issue No. 4 (SO NICE TO MEET YOU AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER), an offered foray into persona with all of us in mind. Behold (again): our Twitter account.

But first, behold: the finery of Issue No. 3, in all of its handheld camera glory. We are ready for our close-up. Come look.

Sincerely,

Amanda Goldblatt, Ed.