Nowhere - About

About

This isn’t so hard. It takes some time, but it’s not hard. We call writers and ask them to submit. We read their stories and either accept them or send them back. If we accept, we talk the story through with the author, ask what knickknacks they brought back from their trip, what images they envision running with the text. When we’re finished we send them a proof. If they don’t like our edits we change them. If we disagree we talk about it. If they’re on a trip, we wait for them to get home…

Over the last year the most common question from readers has been, “When is the next issue coming out?” Our response: “When it’s done.”

We’ve run 28 stories in the last four issues—about boats on the Pacific, prehistoric bears in Romania, haberdashers in Beverly Hills and a Home Depot in Portland, Oregon. The journeys don’t have much in common, other than they moved their authors to write about them. The stories are not contrived or coercing. They cover extraordinary moments, when certain things, places and people line up just right.

A few things have changed since Nowhere launched its first issue. We now have readers in 129 countries. We’ve introduced a reprint department, an international fiction section and two quarterly columns. We opened a forum for readers to rave and rant at the end of each story. This issue we achieved our dream of three-dimensional scans of objects accompanying a story. (We couldn’t afford actual 3D scans, so we did it our way, for free.)

Some things haven’t changed. We still scheme ways to make the web not so webby, rather simple and homemade. We lean toward the unorthodox, long and lyrical. Some readers still think we’re arrogant. (We ARE!) Others get a kick out of the material we run.

Either way, we’re still here, still turning out issues, and will for some time. Because we believe there should be an alternative, something substantial, done for no reason at all. Besides, it’s not that hard. It takes a little time, but it’s fun. So why the hell not.