Welcome to the thirteenth issue of Whistling Shade. That’s three years—a benchmark for small pubs, which often don’t make it past their second. Since the premier issue of our literary newspaper in the summer of 2001, we’ve published over a hundred poems, fifty stories, fifty reviews and twenty-odd essays. Put together it would make a Norton-sized anthology, with artists local, national, and international. Some of our writers have established careers and several books to their credit, while others are being published for the first time. In all cases, we selected their work because we thought that you, our readers, would enjoy it. That’s the one cardinal difference between Whistling Shade and most other literary journals—we publish to a mainstream readership. Our circulation of 2500 is distributed to cafes, book stores, libraries and other locations for the general public. Our readers aren’t exclusively MFA students, aspiring writers or an elite class of literati; our mission is not to promote a certain style or school of writing. We publish what we think our readers would like—not only like, but be inspired by, be driven wild by, be dazzled by in that complete, all-encompassing light that only literature can illuminate with.

Although three years have brought many changes, this prime directive has remained—to promote literature of the highest kind by bringing it into the public eye. No doubt poetry and short fiction will remain on the outskirts of popular culture for years to come, invisible but half-remembered, that whistling shade in the back of the common mind; indeed it is hard to imagine it ever regaining the celebrity of Twain and Dickens, Byron and Millay. But poems and stories have been around over five thousand years, and though they may seem rather antique in an age of Google and text messaging, they still speak to our inmost conscience as nothing else can. To play a small part in that tradition in the past three years has been a great honor and satisfaction to me, and only occasionally (right around an issue deadline) like the Labors of Hercules. I’d like to thank our talented staff for sharing many of those labors, and the writers for contributing their genius. But most of all I’d like to thank our readers, for making this rather eccentric experiment of a literary newspaper a success. See you at the reading!

- Joel Van Valin