First Impressions

[John F]

From Roxane's Post:

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Co-editor Iris Moulton had this to say about Beecher’s:

Beecher’s = ”magazine-as-fetish-object”

Henry Ward Beecher, a prominent abolitionist and social reformer,
began shipping Sharps rifles to arm the growing anti-slavery movement
in crates labeled Bibles. He believed this was a battle to be fought
with passion, and viewed the guns in these crates as imbued with moral
power. Soon abolitionists dubbed these Sharps rifles Beecher’s Bibles.

….

History is important to Lawrence, Kansas. The first literary magazine
at the University of Kansas,Cottonwood, was established in 1960. It
can claim a publishing record of Allen Ginsberg, William Stafford, and
Rita Dove. While I was being recruited to the MFA program I was told
all about this promising magazine, and the literary scene in Lawrence.
Any writer here can tell you where William S. Burroughs drank (The
Bourgeois Pig) and where he was photographed walking (behind The
Jazzhaus). Ask and we’ll drive you by the boyhood home of Langston
Hughes.

….

Beecher’s seeks to stand apart by way of our appreciation for physical
beauty—fine paper, the way an “f” might curl—and our specific, some
might say ambitious, aesthetic standards for what we publish.

….

Henry Ward Beecher knew one thing for sure: powerful things are best
snuck in unsuspecting packages. Beecher’s, armed with a wonderful
staff full of exciting ideas, may appear to be just another fledgling
university publication, but what it really holds may surprise you.

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I received my copy of Beecher's this morning. After a few flip-
throughs, it still impresses me as an object, especially the "fine
paper, the way an 'f' might curl."

I enjoyed the frillslessness of the magazine's opening. There's no
opening letter or statement from the editors, no reference to attempts
at fundraising, the difficulties of large-scale small-budget projects,
and the support from the University of Kansas. There is no space but
the physical between the table of contents and the magazine's
content.

I thought Alec Niedenthal's "Sailing" was a thrilling little piece of
flash fiction, notable for its inclusion of the words and phrases,
"whooped him bloody," "the tenderness of history," "the barbarous
queller of my passion," and "descanting." It ends at a place of
exaltation for the narrator, narrating from the present tense. The
reader's exalted too, as the sentences sort of shimmy their way
towards the story's end, after the bumpy patch of redundancies around
the time of the narrator's name-changing game ("...only I will be
Roger and Roger will be me, Alex, so that I will finally kill Roger
but Roger will be me, Alec...").

I've also read (meaning re-read, as flash fiction often -- if not
always -- demands) "His Name in Gold" by Rhoads Stevens. Beautiful
structure in this one, the first few sentences forecasting the last.

What are some of your first impressions of the magazine?