Associate Editor Kate Jayroe: Recently, I looked back in time, to an era in which I was preparing to submit writing for the first time ever. I was a Millennial college student in rural Tennessee. I rocked the cat eye makeup look (still do), streamed Girls each week as it originally aired, ate pizza hurriedly with a fork before my weekly Faulkner seminar, and was feeling my brain, in real time, grow deeply obsessed with writing short fiction. A close friend of mine suggested not once but twice that I enroll in the Introductory Fiction workshop. “No really, Kate, listen to me and take this class . . .” She was right! I was hooked.
Each week, I pored over the Word Docs, created imaginary people, and felt my girlhood-past and my woman-future merge. To have a character walk across the room? To have them eat? Have sex? It was like the most exacting and trying moments of attempting to move Barbies about the Dream House—not just in my mind, but in the minds of an eventual audience as well.
When it came time to think about submitting my writing, I soon discovered, there was a whole world out there. With WigLeaf Top 50 and Cliff Garstang as my Yellow Brick Road, I set out on a path to seek the cool, the weird, and what we would perhaps label today as “the vibe” of online contemporary short fiction writing.
In this new series, I’ll be sharing a snapshot of the virtual literary scene of yore, hoping to connect and reconnect with folks who also recall or who would love to know more about what was happening back then.
This time, I’m so excited to focus on the defunct and ultra cool Kitty Snacks, a literary journal edited by Michael Bible. Using the Wayback Machine, I was happily able to peruse parts of its 2011 blog.
What immediately struck me was the awesome banner image of a hand reaching toward potted meat on what appears to be a truck dashboard. The southern gothic contemporary weirdness connected with me then, and it feels like warmth and even a bit like home to me when I revisit it today.
Beneath a banner eulogizing Barry Hannah are featured stories by writers I love and admire, writers I’ve followed from early stages of their careers to now, as their legacies continually set the standard for American contemporary fiction.
As a mentee and longtime fan of Kevin Wilson’s work, it was no surprise to see his name, particularly in this era of his idiosyncratic and often set-in-the-south, voice-driven stories. But I was shocked to also see early pieces by Matthew Salesses, who has gone on to actively shape our contemporary craft landscape, and Leni Zumas, who would become my future MFA thesis advisor and the author of Red Clocks, a dystopian masterpiece that eerily predicted core aspects of our current political and societal era. Her latest book, Wolf Bells, releases next week!
In addition to the off-kilter aesthetics and the incredible roster of badass writers, I was struck by just how dedicated and lo-fi Kitty Snacks appeared to be. We know that literary journals often come from a deep place of admiration and love, and to see this piece of literary past is akin to napping under a handmade quilt, hearing an old 45 as it spins, taking a sip of localized, antiquated soda.
I’ll be back again with another look into the past. In the meantime, I highly recommend checking out the Wayback Machine and visiting the magic of Kitty Snacks yourself!
