Welcome back to Home Planet!
We hope that on your visit you enjoy poetry by Joan E. Bauer, Tim Kahl, Donald Mangum, Carolyn Martin, George Moore, John Popielaski, Dan Sicoli, Eva Skrande, George Wallace, A.D. Winans, & Eve Young; short stories by Julie Brandon, Neil Brosnan, Michael Loyd Gray, & David Lerner; not one but two reviews by Lehman Weichselbaum; & visual art by HPN’s very own globetrotting editor Riley A. Vann. Also, we’re trying something a bit different in Issue 13 by including songs written & performed by Don Bertschman.
In our previous issue, I discussed the organic theory utilized to produce Home Planet as well as how we pick & choose what to publish. I also made a few good-natured remarks about not letting the selection process get you down. Along those lines, the best way to cultivate an understanding of what kind of material we want is to read Home Planet. We feature a variety of styles & voices, without any preference for a particular school. Our basic criterion is that it’s good–like that soup Warhol “pop-art-ulized,” if we’re to believe the propaganda. As to how we define good, perhaps my tongue-in-cheek advice from “To Make a Poem Work” in The Courtship of Winds will bear fruit, or at the very least plant seeds, in providing you insight into the matter.
As a rule of General Tom Thumb, if you think you’ve written something we’d like–even if it’s not something explicitly covered in our guidelines–I hope you won’t be afraid to share it with us. The worst that will happen is we’ll say “no.” Sadly, such is an unavoidable part of the terrain of any writer’s journey. But I assure you, we are, unlike some people, human beings. You will hear back from us eventually. If you haven’t, I recommend checking your Spam folder or contacting us (hpnlitmag@yahoo.com). On a couple occasions in the short reign of Pippin IV, or rather, my first year experience as editor of HPN, we’ve been unable to publish work we’d accepted because the writers never replied to emails regarding their acceptances & the availability status of their submissions.
According to the aforementioned Thumb, another solid tip for writers of all stripes is to check their submissions more often than seasonally. Please be kind enough to let us know immediately upon rewinding if your work has been accepted elsewhere. Please don’t wait until a hard-working editor has spent the better part of a day setting up your work for publication in the magazine, only to be informed that you forgot to tell us that the piece has already been “snagged.” Even so, I don’t hold a grudge, if for no other reason than I’m really bad at remembering names.
Many thanks, as always, to our contributors & readers. Without you, we simply wouldn’t exist. I guess Berkeley had a point with that esse est percipi nonsense after all.
Matt