e2ink-1: The Best of the Online Journals 2002 by Guest Editor: Pam Houston, Series Editor: Melvin S

“Just because everything is different doesn’t mean anything has changed.”
— Irene Peter

There’s a quiet battle raging in the literary world (of course, it would be a quiet battle — literary types were all raised in libraries, where “shhh!” ruled and “using one’s inside voice” was a habit acquired early and retained for life.) It’s been going on for quite some years, largely as a debate among academicians, social commentators, and those who work as writers and editors, but fueled by occasional spurts of general media attention from time to time.

The issue? Are electronic magazines the salvation of the literary arts in tight economic times — or the ruination of the fine art of reading?

Web critics point to the proliferation in the last decade of cyberjunk zines that are here today and gone tomorrow, featuring self-indulgent and semi-literate writing, pornographic material, and extremist rants. Noted author Todd Gitlin, whose current book Media Unlimited examines the barraging of the contemporary mind by electronic stimuli of every sort, remarked in a March 2002 speech to the Commonwealth Club of California, “It’s frequently said that many people who ‘read’ online are actually doing a kind of heavy skim, a lot of scrolling.” An even stronger indictment comes from Prof. William Gass in his 1999 Harper’s article, “In Defense of the Book,” in which the electronic age is blamed for not only the decay of the English language, but the corruption of the human intellect. At the heart of the criticism seems to be the sense that the medium engenders a restless mindlessness in a population already suspected of only wanting panem et circences — “bread and circuses,” as Juvenal so aptly observed about the citizenry of the Roman Empire at its decline.

On the other hand, the advocates of Internet publishing haul the academics and the intellectual illuminati out of their ivy-covered halls and ivory towers to remind them of hard realities. Cutting of state and federal funds to the arts, the ever-worsening general economy that puts a serious squeeze on even the most prosperous publishers and academic institutions, and the rapidly shrinking spendable dollar of the average American can mean only one thing for printed literary magazines — extinction. And as these esteemed gatekeepers of contemporary ideas, creative trends and timeless writing slip into oblivion, along with them inevitably goes the short story, a form whose only real home for the last two centuries has been within the pages of these small but influential journals.

Are online literary magazines successfully filling the gap left as print journals succumb to precarious economic times? Or is the Internet proving to be an even vaster, more mind-numbing and intellect-deadening wasteland than (God help us) television?

e2ink: The Best of Online Journals 2002 definitively demonstrates that good literature is alive and well and readily available on the web. Patterned after various prestigious anthologies that honor the best fiction each year in print journals, e2ink makes a powerful case for the legitimacy of electronic magazines, both as conservators of traditional narrative forms and champions of the best cutting-edge literary trends. There is an admirable consistency of quality in this collection, an amazing Zen-like oneness of mind among all the editors who read the nominations that has created a volume worthy of a place next to the yearly Pushcart Prize and O. Henry Award anthologies.

The fiction in this book is nothing less than breathtaking. There is not one bad apple to be found in the entire barrel. Moreover, it has the perfection of a Harry & David gourmet fruit basket — each selection flawless and guaranteed to delight. I wish I’d written all of them myself — the highest compliment one writer can pay another. And in this case, I pay it to 15 authors who have crafted stories that are among the best I’ve read in the last few years. In their precision of detail, richness of language, and absolutely authenticity of voice, these works easily rival — or in some cases, surpass — what is presently being published in many print journals.

While the temptation is to take all 15 stories and give each the attention it deserves, space necessitates the selection of only a representative handful. In the order they appear in the anthology, there is Amy Ramsden’s “Trespass,” a dark and disturbing exploration of the secrets one carries to a grave that promises to give no rest. The dispassionate, detached delivery of this story belies the underlying (and mounting) tension of the main character, who by circumstance is reminded every day of an unconfessed crime he committed years before.

In “Pink Oleander,” the reader slips back into the murky territory of a recalled childhood, rich with random memories rendered unreliable by the passage of years and the underlying emotional currents that remain unsettled in the narrator’s mind. “That summer,” she says, “I was trying to decide whether to become a whore or a poet.” From that moment on, the reader is inescapably drawn into a world that is at once compellingly beautiful but terribly askew. The language and imagery the writer wields, coupled with a subtle but pervasive eroticism, is exquisite — so much so that, in many ways, it is the story.

“Balm,” by Carolyn Mikulencak, is an idiosyncratic narrative that captivates the reader by its very eccentricity. The premise is intriguingly bizarre. A boy has fallen to his death from the narrator’s mother’s bathroom window. The plot is ostensibly about the mother’s children trying to piece together the actual events, which never become entirely clear, because the story is really about many other things that are much more interesting. The vain, strange, fascinating figure of the mother, a woman who has come to see everything as an expression of the mysterious and terrible hand of fate, dominates the work:

Mom was always interpreting things as signs. She never got over the fact that Jennifer was born on Good Friday or that I had my first perm on the day she found out about my father’s affair?Once, when we were walking to the car in the supermarket parking lot, we saw the sun flash. Mom dropped the groceries. She ushered us back into the store where we sat?until Grandma picked us up in the Lincoln. Mom was convinced that our car was marked, by the flash, for certain destruction.

The narrator protests to her mother, “It’s not like we were the only ones to see it happen. Is everyone at the Winn-Dixie doomed?” Her sister Jennifer intervenes: “Leave her alone. Jesus. She’s just seen the very face of death.” Balm is an unforgettable story of fate, family dysfunction, and the way we choose what to remember and how to remember it.

Myla Goldberg’s “Going for the Orange Julius” paints a portrait of a slick grandmother living vicariously through her pubescent granddaughter. Everything in the older woman’s world is charged with sexual significance — the height of your heels, the color of your lipstick, how your blouse is tucked in, even how you spray your hair. “Only tramps spray hair spray directly onto their heads?glommed hair is one thing guys notice without knowing they’re noticing it when they first peg a girl for a tramp,” and “Grandma says that in order to keep a man it’s important to act interested to and give him a little taste?”

The grandmother’s advice is funny, all the more so because it has the ring of truth, but her manipulation of a young girl’s mind for her own unwholesome purposes is thoroughly chilling.

One of the happiest surprises for this reviewer in reading e2ink was to discover “experimental” fiction that was readable, understandable, and truly innovative, exploring adventurous avenues of narrative while remembering that communication is the reason for all storytelling. In “Churches of Arkansas,” Michael Karl (Ritchie) depicts the life of a huckster and his rocky road to redemption via a whirlwind church-tour-from-hell that is both literal and symbolic — ten denominations in eight pages, featuring the world, the flesh and the devil at every turn. Wry and right-on-target insights into religion, human nature, sexuality, racism, fate, and grace make this a multi-layered tour-de-force.

Similarly, writer Jim Ruland effectively uses the contents of a closet to describe the ruins of a man’s life in the whimsical and poignant “Kessler Has No Lucky Pants.” He also breaks new literary ground by creating a narrative without a narrator, written from a POV that is not first, second or third person and is both ambiguous and specific at the same time — a remarkable feat that he brings off in seemingly effortless style.

Bruce Taylor’s “Exercise” powerfully proves that less is definitely more. The story of a disintegrating marriage is couched in terms of a typical assignment in a writing class. It opens:

Take a story from real life, one you are having trouble focusing. Cut the story in half. Cut it in half again. What you’re left with is the essentials of the story you will be able to see more clearly.

The first version of a couple’s troubled life is 259 beautifully written and richly evocative words. However, with each subsequent whittling, from 259 to 130 to a final 64 words, the true, unsentimentalized and ugly picture of two desperately unhappy people boldly emerges. The stark contrast between the three versions reminds the reader that, in great literature, what is not said is as important, or more so, than what is said. This stunning story is both a writing lesson and a life lesson.

e2ink is a brilliant collection of memorable and noteworthy stories that merit multiple re-readings. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first-of-its-kind anthology to honor fiction appearing only in online journals — “about time,” in the words of many magazine editors with an eye for works who have found their first home on the web. The second in the series will shortly be underway, as the editors begin the process of gathering nominations from the crop of 2002 online stories.

Whether e2ink will help to settle the great online vs. print journal controversy and confer literary legitimacy to electronic publications is arguable. But one thing is certain. It will stand as a permanent reminder that good literature can be found any place where you have the fortuitous combination of gifted writers, perceptive editors, and discerning readers — even in cyberspace.

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As strong supporters of all types of literary journals, PopMatters Books is publishing an ongoing series of reviews and articles on the topic. Previously published:
Without Covers://literary_magazines@the_digital_edge
The War To Keep The Written Word Alive
The Alaska Quarterly
Happy
The Lynx Eye
Lonzie’s Fried Chicken
North American Quarterly
Ploughshares
Shenandoah
Tampa Review
Coming soon: Zyzzyva, Gargoyle, and more.