I like fruit baskets, because a fruit basket enables you to mail somebody fruit without appearing insane. If you just mail somebody some apples, they’re like,“Huh? What the hell is this?” But if you put those apples in basket, they’re like, “This is nice!”
—Demetri Martin
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
—Wallace Stevens
Dear Readers,
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. It seems like only yesterday that we were saying hello to you, announcing our grand plans for Gulf Coast. And here we are, two years and a few gray hairs later, rapidly approaching the end of our tenure. We always knew we were just another set of foster parents for Gulf Coast, but it didn’t matter; it quickly felt like our baby. And what a big, beautiful baby to be handed! The depth of our common editorial delusion didn’t truly sink in until the recent AWP conference in Seattle, where many a former GC editor sauntered up to the book table—some beaming like proud grandparents, others eyeing us suspiciously, like we were one big Auntie Mame who had been corrupting their precious journal with jazz and gin.
That’s when it hit us: we, too, have to give our baby up for adoption. No lie, it’s a little painful to pour so much time and love into something only to give it up as soon as you’ve got the knack for it, but such is the way of the “student-run” rotating editorship we so fiercely defended in our first note (25.1). We still believe the built-in dynamism of this model is one of the features that allows Gulf Coast to grow and stay relevant. Furthermore, it is the long lineage of proud editor-parents—the family tree if you will—that gives the journal its identity, its rootedness, that almost-impossible-to-articulate understanding that every GC editor seems to inherit (and which is surely passed down from our primogenitors, Donald Barthelme and Phillip Lopate) about whether something is or isn’t “Gulf Coast-y.” We think this inherited sense of identity, paired with the short-term editorships, actually allows Gulf Coast to grow quickly without the danger of losing its center. When you know you only have two years to make your mark, and when you see what past editorial teams have done before you, you tend to get stuff done.
The past few years have been good to Gulf Coast, and we’re proud to say that all of our team’s initial plans have come to fruition, and then some—we’ve increased our minimum contributor payments to $50 per page, making us one of the highest paying literary journals around; we’ve increased our circulation and doubled our distribution; we’ve completed our merger with Art Lies, the longtime journal of visual art and critical art writing; we’ve created successful interdisciplinary partnerships with organizations like the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts and the Blaffer Museum; we’ve launched Gulf Coast on digital readers through Litragger; we’ve merged our annual Houston Indie Book Fest with the Menil Community Arts Festival to create a bigger multimedia event: MenilFest; we’ve increased our emphasis on the journal’s presentation and design with the understanding that a print journal’s survival depends not only on compiling the best writing and visual art it can find, but also on becoming itself an objet d’art; and, finally, we’re preparing to launch a beautiful new website with a dedicated GC Online section, increased online exclusive content, and a friendlier blog.
In celebration of our fruitful tenure, we leave you with fruit. In addition to Fallen Fruit’s contributions (including their striking banana wallpaper on the cover), this issue is chock-full of literal and metaphorical fruit (just check out the french flaps!). Perhaps we’re stretching the metaphor too far, but we think literature is lot like fruit; we all love it in theory, but none of us consumes nearly as much as we claim to. With that, we hand over the great big fruit basket that is Gulf Coast and urge you to taste a bit of everything. Go on. It’s good for you.
Karyna McGlynn, Managing Editor
Zachary Martin, Editor