(Click here to see the complete table of contents for Mythic Delirium 0.1.)

Welcome, friends, to the new Mythic Delirium. It’s been a short time in the making, but a long time coming.

I founded Mythic Delirium in 1998 as a do-it-ourselves poetry-only print magazine, and it’s since gone through a couple incarnations—at one time it was a sister magazine to Weird Tales.

Over fifteen years this little ’zine did far better for itself than I ever imagined it would: publishing award-winning verse, giving homes to works from iconic writers, and even helping to launch new careers. Yet in the past couple of years it seemed our amazing run had finally lost steam. We continue to publish great poems—but what’s been true throughout the print industry has been true even in our tiny corner. Subscriptions were shrinking. Mythic Delirium had been unique among DIY ’zines in its ability to sustain itself, but alas, that was no longer possible.

For some time now I’ve had a hankering to try my hand at a webzine that showcased fiction as well as poetry. (I actually did this for a little while in the late 1990s, as part of the team that put out the first version of Event Horizon, but never solo.) I experimented with fiction publishing again in 2006, when I produced the two MYTHIC anthologies, short, elegant books that mingled fiction and poetry. The experiment, though fun, wasn’t viable in the long term, though I took what I learned and used it to create the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies. #SFWApro

And last year, for the sake of assembling a fourth Clockwork Phoenix volume, I for the first time tested out that newfangled crowdfunding machine known as Kickstarter. I asked folks in our wonderful and supportive genre community for help publishing Clockwork Phoenix 4 and ultimately raised more than $10,000 for a $5,000 project. One of the goals the campaign funded—and here I must give my friend and colleague Rose Lemberg credit for the inspiration—was a full year’s worth of a new online journal for poetry and fiction. My Kickstarter backers put me in a better position to take on such a thing than I had ever been in—it’s almost as if the project had to wait for its moment. And that moment had finally arrived.

Click here to read the rest of the editorial.