A Nostalgic Look at the Virtual Literary Scene of Yore

Volume II.

Associate Editor Kate Jayroe: Do you find yourself, at the end of the year, feeling quite Janus-like? Simultaneously reviewing the past while looking forward to the future? I certainly do.  

I’m eager to work on my own writing this month. When I close my eyes, I see my future words carrying over from page to page, like the benevolent roil of a great, hot porridge. My current novel project is deeply rooted in my primal obsessions as a writer. There’s an eerily triumphant feeling of returning to one’s OG fiction fishing spot. I’ve told my advisor, my friends, and my writing group: “This is something I would’ve written twelve years ago if I could have.” And so, my face, looking at her future, is undoubtedly also looking toward her past.  

In my most recent travails on the Wayback Machine, I uncovered a treasure trove of bizarre, talented work over at the New York-based The Fiction Circus. Its site, established in 2008, has a frenetic look and feel to it. The background of the site is composed of marker lines filling a page. Slightly dizzied and fully mesmerized, I find myself thinking of two things at once as I peruse the site. There’s the obvious, which would be the hand-drawn lines, an image evoking a sort of chaotic methodology, a hand moving up and down, filling the page line by line with the thick black lines. But it also makes me think of television static in its contrived liminality, its overwhelming presentation of something that is not quite one thing or another.  

The stated mission of The Fiction Circus has a fun, punk attitude:  

The Fiction Circus has three rings. We are a devoted, semi-clandestine organization operating out of Queens and Brooklyn to make three impossible things happen:

1) To create a free online fiction magazine with rolling submissions, reviews, rants, rhetoric, and the finest, tightest short stories around.

2) To perform short fiction con brio for the bad people of New York, wherever we can, delivered expertly in hour-long bursts inside a frame narrative that binds, illumines, and surprises.

3) To create a clearinghouse for the world’s hard-working, doomed writers who each day see their world get a little smaller. We will build the largest slush pile in the world!

You got bad, fiction world. You got lazy and sad. We are going to make you good again.

The Fiction Circus masthead lists Miracle Jones, Stephen Future, Goodman Carter, and Xerxes Verdammt as the primary figures behind the magic. 

Perusing the stories, I found myself happily immersed in the circus’s gifts. In “The Smallest Actions” by Chavisa Woods, a transient father quietly appears, agitates the dysfunctional status quo, then disappears again. Its gothic, mystery sensibilities seep wonderfully into each moment.  

He’d been gone three days when he returned. From where, they did not know. Maybe he didn’t know either. They were still as he entered, his seven children settin’ doll eyed on the living room floor. They did not rise to meet him. They did not jump and shout ‘daddy daddy,’ and slide down his legs, unrelenting, little drunken memories tugging at his pockets. They just kept settin,’ watching, as he steadied his bony hip against the sink and slowly undid the dusty blue buttons on his polyester work coat that probably hadn’t seen work for weeks, at least not the kind of work that pays.

We arrive in the story with the father. There’s an opening fatigue that’s carried into and through each paragraph, weighing down the words with a darkly shimmering thickness.  

And in Sharon Kwik’s tragically prescient “Operation Atlas,” the narrator navigates an Immigration system growing evermore labyrinthine by the minute.  

Tomorrow is the deadline for Special Registration for all males age 16 and older from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The list grows daily, divided into four groups each with their own fluctuating deadlines. Soon it will encompass all countries outside of the United States. My mother called me yesterday to tell me to be careful: the Prime Minister of Canada has joined France and Russia saying that he, too, is against this war. She tells me Canadians are afraid of how the U.S. will retaliate against them.

I speed-walk in the dark towards the subway. The line is bound to be over the Brooklyn Bridge by the time I make it down there. If I wait long enough I can probably step into line right outside my front door.

The use of the list in the first paragraph and then the ticking clock in the subsequent section culminates in that sense of systemic overwhelm. Its relevancy is both compelling and haunting. 

In addition to awesome short fiction, there’s all sorts of Great Recession—era Internet juiciness under The Fiction Circus’s virtual, black-and-white striped tent. I suggest you check it out and feel for yourself that strange, magical pulling of time bending both forward and back.