Becoming Infocalypse

This October’s issue will not only wrap the end of Infocalypse’s first year; it will arrive almost exactly one year after the magazine was conceived.

The idea came during the Alberta teachers’ strike. After thirty-five years in education, I was on strike for the first time, carrying all the anger, uncertainty, and strange suspended energy that came with it. Somewhere inside that disruption, Infocalypse began.

Starting a literary magazine and website from scratch has been one of the most exhilarating things I have ever done. It brought back my joie de vivre—that feeling of making something because it simply has to exist.

Every issue has been an experiment. Some ideas worked immediately. Others taught me something by becoming impossible. The Prologue was one of those.

It began with the idea of movie trailers that contain scenes never shown in the finished film: material that belongs to the world of the work without belonging to the final object. I imagined the Prologue in much the same way—a companion piece for extraordinary work that could not fit inside the magazine.

Instead, it quietly became a second magazine. We were producing a Prologue and then, one month later, a full issue. For a team of two people, this was not ambitious. It was absurd.

So we are changing course. Rather than releasing a separate Prologue, we will feature writers and artists on the website every week. This gives the work time to be seen, gives us momentum between issues, and creates the continual sharing and conversation I wanted in the first place.

At the same time, Reviews and Recursions has become one of the most exciting parts of Infocalypse. We have just published a review of the new play Double Serpent beside a discussion of “Telstar” and a return to Soylent Green. That collision delights me. Art does not exist in a release cycle. It exists in conversation.

We are also still working to make one important distinction clear: the magazine is not the website. The website is where the conversation continues. It is not the magazine itself.

Many literary publications exist primarily online, and their websites are the magazines. I admire many of them greatly, but that has never been the intention for Infocalypse.

Infocalypse is conceived as a magazine first: curated, sequenced, designed, and meant to be experienced as a complete object. For now, that object exists as a PDF, but it is laid out for print because the long-term goal is for it to become print.

Now that we are retiring the Prologue, we can confidently say that Infocalypse will continue with four full issues next year, beginning in February. We already have extraordinary work waiting.

Before then, our final issue of this year arrives October 15. The theme is Ghost in the Machine, and submissions remain open through Duotrope.

If you are reading this newsletter, help us spread the word.

Tell your writer friends. Your poet friends. Your photographers, filmmakers, musicians, painters, performers, playwrights, designers, and beautifully uncategorizable artist friends that there is a magazine and website out here looking for work that does not fit neatly into boxes.

Art does not have to behave before it deserves attention.