this Alice Munro sentence:
"And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together — radiant, everlasting."
🤍
hot take: there should be many contemporary literary journals publishing many different kinds of work in many different mediums and modes, and the only thing they all need to have in common is that it SHOULD NOT COST MONEY TO SEND THEM YOUR WORK. THIS IS BASIC AS HELL IN FACT
For issue 1.2, to appear online on the estival solstice, June 20, we're looking for work that, in ways both direct and indirect, are in conversation with other writers and artists. For more information, including when and how to submit, please read here:
we're delighted to see atmospheric 1.1 contributor Di Jayawickrema's poem "the moon is far away yet it sways the tides" featured
@Poetry_Daily
today. congrats
@onpapercuts
🌙💙💫
hey, readerly-and-also-online human: what are your favorite ways that journals bring attention to the work of the writers they've published? asking for a cloud
to everyone following, reading us, sharing links, engaging or supporting in any way: thank you. this editor has never experienced this volume of twitter notifications before!
@joelyfitch
and
@anthgarrett
will both be sharing more links to our pieces in the upcoming weeks 🌤️
alright, people of the internet: our journal is live. (see link in bio!) there are no broken links. if you find one, Jo will fix it. a drifty critical cloud may yet appear on the horizon, but for now, enjoy atmospheric, and enjoy this Andy Sia poem:
🚪
atmospheric 1.2 is gathering on the horizon, literary with a chance of weather, currents are circulating, patterns forming, interlacing networks of influence traceable, editors carefully reading away 🌤️
notes on practicalities from the clouds:
-hello! we are a quarterly online journal publishing words for words' sake (poetry fiction cnf hybrid etc) and criticism (words about other words or art)
-we'll have a website up shortly (next week if an editor gets her act together)
ok, here's a bit of April fun for your Thursday scrolling: what made you love poetry? was there a particular poem, a particular poet, a reading, a book... tell us a story about encountering poetry in the replies 💙
always a good day* to think about sending your work to atmospheric... details
*it will continue to be a good day for this for approximately 11 more days
important, and under-discussed: one should write poems for practice! for fun! in the margins! all the time! one cannot (and shouldn't) always wind up with a beautiful/publishable product—that's not how you wind up with something interesting. opinion, but a strong one.
weather forecast: one brand-new online journal, cloudy with a chance of contemporary literature, appearing in the field of your screens 3/19 approx midafternoon eastern. stay tuned...
(and, hey, come to our Zoom launch? 100% chance of atmospheric)
⛅️
you didn't think we'd forgotten the eclipse, did you? of course we had an editor on the ground for this very atmospheric event! (geography was on our side, there.)
strange and lovely light from the path of totality, Harrison, OH, 4/8/24. more in the replies...
a note on our submissions process for this first issue: since we are BRAND NEW / building this thing from the ground up, we're putting a debut issue together mostly by soliciting work and/or reaching out to people right here on "the internet," but we'll do open calls in future 💙
back to work (various) for this editor, but hey, have you got plans on Tuesday night? 8:30 eastern? wanted to invite you to our zoom launch w/several BRILLIANT vol. 1.1 contributors!!! more tweets on this subject forthcoming! there will be readings! faces! it'll be a time :) 🫶
do you people realize that
@Little__Engines
is FREE in PRINT!? that is so cool. like they're online too and whatnot, but they will literally mail a literary journal on newsprint to your house for ZERO MONEY. we love that
Tonight at 8:30 ET I’m reading some new poems to celebrate the launch of
@atmosphericliterary
, which I’m honored to have two new poems in! Coming any minute now!
Come hang with us!
we would love to see more translations in our inbox to consider for atmospheric 1.2. here's the beginning of Argentinian poet Susana Villalba's "The Tree," translated by
@robin_ep_myers
read the rest: 💙
responses to all work sent to us for atmospheric 1.2 have now been sent - if we've missed something and you didn't hear back, do feel free to follow up!
here are some clouds and cloud-reflections from the river. 🌤️
quick note to anyone who's reached out about sending work within the last week or so - we've had to RELUCTANTLY stop considering things for the debut issue, but we'll read and consider your work for the upcoming issue! submissions currently more-or-less closed / open call April
the fact that writers have to pay journals to read their work is actually an absurdity of modern life and I'm sort of surprised we've all allowed it to become the norm. not trying to start a discourse, just perpetually bewildered. it will always be free to send work to us 🤍
online on a sunday? reply here and tag your very fave journals! bonus points if you say why you love them! we try to keep up with following/following-back journals and writers and nice literary humans always 🩵
@dlseuss
gets it: "It is / pleasant // to be without edges. To be a cloud / in a voluminous sky."
from "Ballad, in Sestets,"
@CoupletPoetry
, one of the gorgeous pair of poems linked below! 🌤️🌤️
“I didn’t start faking it until 5th grade. / In 5th grade I started borrowing my best friend’s clothes. / I realized beauty was a matter of income and opportunity.”
@dlseuss
, “Outside the Twat System”
@CoupletPoetry
we aspire to be the atmospheric quarterly of appreciating clouds and publishing literature. send us your creations:
we're reading through the end of April for our summer issue, and will respond to all received work by the end of May. :)
some
@TomSnarsky
poems for your Sunday, and much more in the index (infinity symbol, top right):
"One cloud may hide another
Or hide from another
Or go seek"
🌤️🕯️💫
an important note on what we're doing here: ATMOSPHERIC is a literary journal that does not find the distinction between "poetry" and "prose" to be functionally meaningful in the year of our lord 2024. we'll distinguish between words-for-words'-sake and criticism, but that's it!!
"There is a sense of horror which apparently comes from the fact that your body is a physical thing with porous boundaries. Nobody in the world can be completely insulated from the atmosphere; the atmosphere can be influenced by any living body."
Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body
flat-out astonishing, mirrored-atmospheric image c/o local heroine
@avecsesdoigts
, who these editors admire for her literary and cloud-appreciation works alike! (we also see these modes, of course, as fundamentally unseparate. like thinking and feeling. just look at those Clouds)
pics from an editor's sunset walk w/their dad • sky capture made w/extra quantities of Love • happy Roland Barthes Appreciation Day to all who celebrate 💘💘💘
THANK YOU AGAIN TO AN ANONYMOUS DONOR FROM HERE FOR PAYING FOR OUR SQUARESPACE FOR THIS YEAR. YOU ARE OFFICIALLY THE COOLEST. CLOUD EMOJIS IN DIRECTION FOREVER 🌥️🌥️🌥️
@TomSnarsky
"Run through me like teeth / comb me out flat over a sky" rings out one of
@AnnaLauraReeve
's poems, also describing what her words do to me. Buy her words here:
Do yourself the pleasure of reading them here:
We're already actively soliciting Arabic and Muslim poets and writers for our inaugural issue, but if you're a Palestinian or Palestinian diaspora writer, please be in touch. We want to feature your work!
whee, this worked! hello new followers! we are a Brand New Literary Journal nominally about clouds and really about everything. we like criticism and interesting sentences across various genres and modes.
stay tuned • issue 1.1 drops 3/19 • clouds love you 🫶
we're pretty darn close to one thousand "followers," maybe you should repost our website or something... its link-card thing shows up on other platforms, not sure what the issue is on here! vive le contemporary-lit-in-the-age-of-the-algorithm! 🌥️
"Good writing casts a spell, but spells can be hard to find." —
@xlorentzen
for
@Harpers
, 2019
this essay on criticism-in-the-age-of-Online is fascinating; highly recommend the read
this somewhat-joking piece from
@havehadhavehad
is actually the most accurate description of contemporary Submittable Culture I've ever seen.
we don't have writers' guidelines yet but we will (earnest) for our first open call in April :) that is all!!!
An editor doesn't have favorites—except when they have favorites. This editor (
@anthgarrett
) is proud of all the work we will publish on Tuesday. I'm just a little more proud of the poem by DeeAnna Brady-Leader, however.
continuing to find
@annuletpoetics
an inspiration, a delight, a consistent source of awe and a beautiful instance of what a literary journal online can be and do right now. read the editor's note if you like those (this editor does), read the issue, ok!!
two debut publications in our first volume: this beautiful poem and Mahrukh Aamir's brilliant, searching essay on Sheila Heti's ALPHABETICAL DIARIES - both, and far more, exist:
thanks for being here in the haze of the internet with us, readers! 🌤️💙💫
it means so much to me that we could publish DeeAnna Brady-Leader's poem at
@atmosphericlit
, for many reasons - it's enigmatic and tender, and reminds me of Rukeyser, which will always win over this poet/editorial heart. presence and absence, dialectic ontology: all here. 🤍
happy friday, gentle readers. if you're scrolling and want something to do: what's your favorite line from a piece in atmospheric 1.1 ( if you need that)? screenshot-in-the-replies encouraged!! 🫶
@janechuffman
have you read t. fleischmann's SZYGYGY, BEAUTY? possibly misspelled szygygy there and apparently don't feel like looking it up... syzzzzyzyzyzyzgygy anyway it's quite good and related here
hello internet users! we are a little Less Online these daze because we are Putting Together our Literary Journal :)
to stay tuned /// clouds appreciate you 🫶
if someone, or several someones, would be interested in writing responses to this
@uglyducklingprs
volume (avail direct or via
@asterism_books
) for some kind of cluster for us, in a couple of seasons or so maybe... let's talk about that.
an editor trespassed in a midwestern parking lot to take this sunrise snap for you, internet. you'll have to trust us that it was substantially more breathtaking IRL... nevertheless, absolutely atmospheric ✔️
(Cincinnati, OH, 3/29/24 7:52:56 am, shot on somewhat-old iPhone)
thinking about Sara Ahmed's extremely apt locution "it matters how we arrive at things" again, currently in reference to how much presses and distributors determine our contemporary literary scene: what books exist, and what they cost, and who can get ahold of them and how.
Just start even though it makes no sense to you and it's stupid! You don't need logic or brilliance at this part! You don't have to answer anything like where is this going to exist or how are you even going to get through the rest of your life like this. You just need to start!
Publishing a bilingual poetry excerpt by one of Argentina's greatest living poets, Susana Villalba, translated by one of our greatest living translators
@robin_ep_myers
is an honor I won't surpass anytime soon. You do yourself a disservice by not reading.
@milkcratejess
The title of
@poetjohncompton
's "tender community of fabled people" is the best title I could give to aq's writers and readers, a title that couldn't be acheived without john or his heartbreakingly beautiful poem.
Wong May poem via C.D. Wright's editorial curation, 2013 / happy weekend, readerly humans of the twittersphere. don't forget to read... unless you're too busy looking at flowers 🌸
@aliner
it is strange that this is a thing that is happening - seems symptomatic of larger trends in which anything except unreserved praise is seen as "hating" something... weird, doesn't make much sense at all
Now with 100% More Normal Title-Case,
"I can’t help but think about this amalgam-friend even as Alphabetical Diaries, like all compelling books, is not a representation. Like all compelling books, it is the thing itself." —Mahrukh Aamir, here:
for
@atmosphericlit
, Mahrukh Aamir essays on Sheila Heti's ALPHABETICAL DIARIES (out now from
@fsgbooks
) - working with Mahrukh on this piece was one of the most delightful things I've gotten to do as an editor. read:
what's the last thing you read online that you kept thinking about for more than a week? link, please. all genres and reasons accepted; thinking primarily about how very fast things tend to circulate and then fall off the radar on here, and wondering what sticks...