Greetings 
It’s been a week since our Issue One celebration!
Now we’re excited to share two new regular features on “Everything Else,” the place where the Hypothetical spirit takes form between our three yearly issues. You’re reading one of those features right now: my monthly editor’s note. On the first of each month, I’ll give you a portrait of ‘what’s new’ via a Hypothetical lens. Surprises are guaranteed and gently provocative invitations to flip your perspective in new directions are likely; reports on how the literary world challenges me to do this are promised. Today, as I scan Submittable hoping to find some translations from or into Spanish or Arabic, I’m thinking of maps in South America which position “South” at the top, showing that continent’s narrow ends of Chile and Argentina flow visually down the map opening up into the Amazon. There’s no geographical inaccuracy; only a demonstration of how it’s common to position ourselves in the center. I’m writing from New York, a place with strong claims to be the center of literary output & publishing, with a premise of subverting such literary hierarchies. One of my dreams for Hypothetical is that a writer whose work is translated into English for this publication finds new readers who translate it into yet a third language, passing it forward, shifting its center and essence every so slightly as they do. More on this, and other ‘big ideas’ experienced in our daily lives, next month.
The second new blog feature is here! It’s the Monthly Feature, your fix of exciting new prose or poetry every month on the 15th. Today’s kick-off is a double helping. Look ahead to Issue Two with the marvelous The Day He Became Queen by Roberto L. Santiago. Roberto’s three poems set in a world of maternal figures in childhood, motherhood and as grandmother are some of the first material we have selected for Issue Two. Teresa Mei Chuc’s Violin continues to explore the transmission of war’s trauma between generations that she depicts with brutal grace in her contributions to Issue One. We hope these two pieces get you inspired about submitting and reading other work from our contributors. Beginning September 15, the Monthly Feature will be a single serving of a short piece of any genre, judged by the same mission and literary merit criteria as Issue submissions. We’re awaiting your work here.
For the thought-to-chew of this month’s note, I’d like to share a conversation I participated in for Hypothetical during a spring literary salon on ‘genuine storytelling’ and ‘niche-filling’ publications; it took place the same day we published the complete content of Issue One! Writer Alizah Salario curated this event; she also contributed to our inaugural Conversations section with this interview. The salon was packed with journalists, fiction writers, artists, readers, gabbers, those who are part of someone else’s story without even knowing it. My co-panelists, Rob Spillman of Tin House, Michael Shapiro of the Big Roundtable, Noah Rosenberg of Narratively, Halimah Marcus of Electric Literature, and Syreeta McFadden of Union Station, edit publications with unique purposes, histories and audiences. As the newest kid on the block, I had fun listening to the responses we all gave to a common set of discussion themes.
Tin House’s Rob Spillman offered a list of the phenomenal writers whose careers the magazine launched by publishing them for the first time, and how that community building has extended to the Tin House books imprint. Like Tin House, we put new and emerging writers’ work in conversation with award-winning, established writers. Michael Shapiro’s latest venture has a purpose we support enthusiastically, too. (See our mini-manifesto Statement on the Value of Language.) The Big Roundtable publishes long-form narrative: the deep, thought-provoking reportage that Shapiro was accustomed to as a reporter before the average word count of a story was slashed. That movement to the extreme concise statement, the bottom line in lieu of the twists and turns of possibilities, is exemplified in our character-counting Twitter world. The Big Roundtable experiments with readership as a determinant of a story’s economic worth, with profits distributed among writers.
Noah Rosenberg and the Narratively team tell New York stories; if this is the city that never sleeps, that is a well that won’t run dry. They engage readers in one theme, for a full week, one story a day. Narratively’s gorgeous website makes it a place one wants to spend time: almost, almost as satisfying as being presented with the starched pages of a new book. We’re working to make our site more easy to navigate and browse. Narratively pushes against the idea of the Internet as a ‘shallows’ to be clicked through for the next barrage of headlines. Halimah Marcus’ role at Electric Literature includes editor’s notes on Recommended Reading, with incisive analysis about why a work is both distinctive and similar to other literature; these function like text accompanying objects in an exhibit at a museum, a level of curation we aspire to add to Hypothetical. Union Station’s Syreeta McFadden was seated to my left; her mission of expanding the diversity of American voices in circulation was a wonderful segue as she passed the microphone to me. (Syreeta’s Tweet on the Trayvon Martin case “only in America can a dead black boy go on trial for his own murder” – went viral, moving from Twitter to signs carried at vigils after the verdict.) I was able to extend that vision to imagine publishing voices not yet represented in our global canon and topics mostly scribbled in the blank margins as side notes to another narrative.
What I also took away from this panel was how much I learned about our vision by listening to the vision of others. Learning about ourselves from others transfers to a deep belief in the value of reading what issues are being tackled and in what ways by writers in languages we can’t read directly. And that’s one way I hope we can fill a niche in reading experiences, accessible anywhere with an Internet connection. We’re proud to have done this with two Lithuanian writers’ work in Issue One and to congratulate their translator Rimas Uzgiris on his National Endowment for the Arts grant.
Last Thursday I encountered contributors and readers in person but thought about those elsewhere who I still know only via words. We’re excited to publish writing by people we may have never met, whose language we don’t speak, whose country we’ve never been to (yet!), but whose words can teach us how to live. We hope to find such writers by issuing a creed, a statement of purpose, that is justification for creating another journal among the plethora of reading and publication options.
The name of our journal Hypothetical is short and sweet. “A Review of Everything Imaginable” is an essential addendum, to define how vast we want our possibilities to be. Yet the choice of imaginable is significant. We are not a kitchen sink of whatever one could ‘dream up’ for a publication; rather, the notion of “everything imaginable” connects to what moves us, narratives of what is yet to be achieved. “Everything imaginable” is a challenge to write about what we’re taught is ‘unthinkable’ – and to achieve it by first imagining it, then naming it, one step closer to making it a tangible, shared reality.
Thank you for spending time with the first iteration of Hypothetical and the fantastic writers in it. We hope you’ll tell us what you think ~ watch for opportunities to write for the blog, send us a message on Facebook, email us, write us a comment, share a link. A week ago, a crowd of new faces gathered to listen to Cynthia Cruz, Rimas Uzgiris and myself, standing in for Cynthia Huntington, who was reading simultaneously in another state, a sample of Issue One. The room buzzed before and after the readings, but during them, I heard only the silence of listening and the singular experience of words given voice.
We’re already dreaming up ideas for how to involve readers in different time zones and continents to have fun events sharing these stories with each other. Have ideas? What does our creed mean to you? We want to know. We also plan to feature more visual art in Issue Two Fall/Winter 2013: check out how V. B. Borjen illustrated his writing. To conclude with more news about imagery, congratulations to filmmaker Mayeta Clark who graciously allowed us to share images from “Piano Rites” in the background of Issue One. Her film, a story of craftsmen working in one of the last piano manufacturers in the United States, is an official selection of Docutah 2013 Southern Utah International Film Festival. Her documentary’s work is even more crucial now that the South Bronx building has been put up for sale.
See you again in September, or sooner!
~ Cynthia-Marie Marmo O’Brien
Founder
*My recommended reading of the month is Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction Finalist
