Notes from The Disappointed Housewife editor Kevin Brennan:
“The Disappointed Housewife is a literary journal for writers, and readers, who are seeking something different. We like the idiosyncratic, the iconoclastic, the offbeat, the hard-to-categorize. Out of the universe of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, we want to attract work that plays with form and presentation. Work that’s not just outside the box but turns the box inside out.”
Excerpt from Mission Statement
I took a long time debating whether to launch this literary journal. I wondered whether there’s really a need for another online gazette of literature and image, when readers hardly have time to read their friends’ Facebook pages much less an actual book now and then.
But I got to thinking, there are an awful lot of writers out there, looking for places to share their work. And while blogs offer a kind of outlet for works of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, they are generally personal, a lot like online diaries in many ways, and most of all they aren’t curated.
I’ve also found, as a consumer of writing on the web, that I have a hard time finding much of the kind of material I’m really interested in. After a lifetime of reading, I have a taste now for something different. Stories that are made differently, that play with form and presentation.
Publishing, as a business, tends to incentivize writers to produce what they think will sell.
Yet there is a place for “high risk” writing, fresh, creative, experimental, idiosyncratic, idiomatic, iconoclastic writing. Writers should be allowed to have their quirks.
So I decided to forge ahead with this project, to see what comes in over the transom when writers are given the flexibility to “think different,” as Apple used to say.
I’m afraid that many writers will be disappointed that The Disappointed Housewife declines their work. But it will only be because the editors envision another way the piece could be a better fit, a way that better conforms with the journal’s proclivities. It’s not you, it’s us. Don’t be discouraged. We might suggest some possibilities to you, or you can try again with something that you write with us in mind.
Just remember, this is the place to find writing (in all its manifestations) that you can’t find anyplace else.
Thank you, Guy Biederman, for posting about The Disappointed Housewife on Facebook.
Guy’s “Language of Lies” posted in The Disappointed Housewife.
Meet Guy in [Zoom] person:
May 5 and May 19, 2022: Guy will teach flash fiction writing. Free on Zoom through Recovery Writing of Idaho.
#amwriting #justwrite #iamawriter
