Myths & Delusions • Editorial • January 2017
Here in the United States, we have a year of uncertainty ahead.
My day job as a journalist requires me to keep my political views out of the public sphere, though if ever there was a time that I chafed at that restriction, that time is now.
Though it’s without question insignificant in the larger scheme of things—what is a tiny DIY zine when compared to the issues confronted by the marginalized and disenfranchised?—I want to take a moment to reemphasize that Mythic Delirium is a publication open to all voices, from all walks of life.
Since we became our own publishers in 2006, showcasing diversity has been essential to our success. It’s a point of pride for me that we’ve devoted most of our space to women’s writing and given regular platforms to writers of color. It’s also a point of pride for me that we’ve featured writers with backgrounds that happen to range across the political spectrum. These things haven’t resulted from an explicit mission, but simply from our efforts to share the best of the poems and stories we receive, and we’re proud of that, too.
Mythic Delirium will be opening to submissions on March 1 after having been closed for more than a year. (This is a little later than I had originally planned, but I need more time to work on a novel-in-progress.) In anticipation of our call for submissions, I want to highlight this statement from our guidelines: “We are committed to diversity and are open to and encourage submissions from people of every race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, political affiliation, and religious belief.”
Don’t be strangers! Anita and I look forward to the harvest your creativity will make possible.
If you need examples of what we want, the stories and poems in this issue sure make a good start.
Morris Tanafon shows us a horrifying way to prevent a haunting, while Darcie Little Badger conjures a zombie apocalypse so subtle you may wonder if it’s really there. Patricia Russo contemplates trees, enigmatic rituals and the afterlife.
Our poetry in this issue, from Beth Cato, Lynn Hardaker, Olchar E. Lindsann, Sonya Taaffe, and Jane Yolen, instructs in the catching of unicorns and release of familiars, the preferences of Baba Yaga and the battling of monsters, the mysteries of Carcosa and the depictions of dinosaurs.
Once you’ve gobbled up our newest offerings, we have years’ worth of online archives to explore to really give you a taste of the variety we’ll entertain. Nor do you want to miss our April–June 2017 issue, with more poetry from Jane Yolen, Jessica P. Wick, Sara Cleto, Adele Gardner, and Sonya Taaffe, and stories by Barbara Krasnoff, Shveta Thakrar, and Damien Angelica Walters. You’ll need to subscribe to make sure that one doesn’t get by you, which I’ll hope you’ll do, here at the Mythic Delirium Books website, or here at Weightless Books. It’s another point of pride for me that we’ve received so much generous support over the years to keep doing what we do.
And now, we’re arrived in time for a reunion. Let’s see how it fares . . .
—Mike Allen, Roanoke, Va., November 2017
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