The other day at the end of a class I started to talk to one of my classmates about Forum, specifically the concept of getting CCSF students from outside of Forum to share their literary experiences with Boeotia, to give voice as I discussed a bit in a post last week. The thing was I never actually got to my whole Forum/Boeotia pitch because said classmate seemed to be in a bit of a hurry and was out the door before I had barely mentioned Forum at all.
The whole incident is illustrative of something though — we often do have to go out and ask people to send us work. A lot of people don’t know about Forum and so every semester those of us on staff are dispatched to visit classrooms, post flyers, talk to literary or artistically-minded friends and do anything else we can to drum up submissions. And it works. Honestly we get some fantastic stuff, but I’m convinced there’s still more out there.
Which leads me back to this idea of getting the perspectives of those of you who aren’t on the staff. It’s still a new idea that I’ve only begun to explore (though we did have a post from a non-staffer last spring), and there may be a lot of solicitation to come before it bears fruit but if you’re reading this and you’ve got thoughts to share on the literary world we’d like to hear from you. To be more precise, we would like your reviews, critiques, events you’ve been to or perhaps something more personal — what some piece of literature may have meant to you, the experience of hearing a favorite author read, unexpectedly meeting an author in Safeway or on Muni, that kind of thing. If interested, you can send prospective blog pieces to citylitblog@gmail.com. Of course we can’t guarantee what is submitted will be posted. Blog submissions should be somewhere in the 500-1000 word range. Regular submissions for the magazine itself can still go to citylitjournal@gmail.com.
In the meantime, we’ll continue to offer our own explorations of all things literary.
by Ayo Khensu-Ra
Forum Literary Magazine 