Every month, new and no-doubt worthy literary magazines are launched. Many seek to fill a particular niche in the literary landscape, a place to assemble writers concerned with, say, the intersection of the Southern Gothic and SciFi traditions in flash fiction (that actually sounds like a magazine I’d like to read).
New on the scene this month is Carrier Pigeon Magazine (my initial search turned up trade magazines targeted to pigeon enthusiasts). The brainchild of a group of artists and illustrators, who view fiction as a natural partner to their visual work, Carrier Pigeon is a quarterly publication that seeks to be an outlet for both.
Our main goals are to allow artists complete freedom and to have the magazine commercially distributed. We believe the gallery wall should not be the only place left for sincerity in the art world. There are taboos put up between fine art, illustration and design that we would love to destroy by allowing everyone involved in Carrier Pigeon the chance to present a narrative in an undisturbed fashion. We also believe that people are smart enough to understand art that is not packaged for the lowest common denominator but that those people have nowhere to go for such an outlet in the commercial print world. We hope to be that outlet.
I really like the idea of collaboration between disciplines, and can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of the first issue of Carrier Pigeon. They’ve printed 1,000 copies of the Issue I, Vol. I, and you can see some of the artwork in that issue, and subscribe via their website, here. What kind of collaborations or mashups do you dream about? I like the idea of flash fiction turned into comic strips, or stop-motion shorts of genre stories. Sometimes the right interpretation can give a story wings.
