Editors' Notes
Pop the champagne corks, this issue marks our first full year at Verse Wisconsin! Thanks to all our subscribers, donors, and volunteers for helping us bring our vision into being, and especially thanks to the poets whose words and images have filled the pages, online and in print, of Verse Wisconsin over the last year. We are truly grateful to each of you for your contributions, and the many exchanges, conversations, and friendships that have developed through the course of our work.
Recently, we met to brainstorm what the second year might hold in store. We will continue to publish both a print magazine and an online issue. The content of each will continue to be different but interrelated. As happened this year, some of the prose may be featured in both places, and we will continue to select a few of the online issue’s poems to feature in print. Remember our selection is not based on any sort of “best of” criteria. Rather, we hope to feature the variety and range of our online issue, for our print audience.
The biggest change we plan to make is moving to a tri-quarterly schedule, publishing three times a year instead of four. This will allow us to ease up on ourselves a little bit and find more space in our lives for our families and our own writing. Issues will appear in March, July, and November. Your subscription will still cover four issues; it will just last a little longer. We will also no longer read print submissions in the summer months of June, July and August.
The next issue of VW will appear in March. We’ll take this opportunity to remind you that although we’re not a non-profit at this time, your donations are most welcome. We’re grateful for every subscription that comes our way, and equally so for each donation, no matter how small. We operate very close to the bone; VW is an all-volunteer effort, and even $10 makes a difference.
Meanwhile, we’re busily at work on the next year’s plans…partnering with Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf for our online summer theme “Luck of the Draw,” looking at possible upcoming features on form, verse dramas, spoken word, and more, and of course reading the poems that poets across the country and around the world submit. We welcome your poems, letters, and suggestions, and look forward to hearing from you soon!
Thanks to Nora Sturges for allowing us to include some of her remarkable Marco Polo paintings in this issue, and to Cathryn Cofell, Alice D’Alessio, Marie Loeffler, Richard Roe, and Jeanie Tomasko for volunteer proofreading help on VW 104. Lingering errors are, of course, the responsibility of VW’s editors.
