A team of Homer writers is starting a literary journal for the Kenai Peninsula. Volume will publish its first issue next spring.
Matt Iverson is one of Volume's editors. He said they're soliciting submissions for the first issue now.
Matt Iverson: There are four of us behind Volume, four English majors. We all met in the coffee shop here in Homer.
I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke or something. But it's real, and we just realized that there really are a great number of writers and people doing really interesting creative stuff — not only in Homer but throughout the Kenai Peninsula. And they don't have a venue for showcasing their pieces. So we want to be that voice.
KDLL: Are you looking for any sort of submission in particular or do you have a theme you'd like people to adhere to?
MI: You know, we don't have a particular theme for this issue, the inaugural issue. We are open to poetry, fiction, nonfiction. We’re even accepting visual art, though given printing costs for color pages, we will probably only have room for a handful of anything in color. So black and white images especially would be great.
We're also hoping to get some interviews with interesting Alaskans. We're calling it "Interviews with Notable Alaskans" and we're letting the people pitching us persuade us why that person is notable.
One thing we're not looking for is generic Alaskana. There's plenty of that, that road has been well trod by others. And we just want to do something a little different.
KDLL: How are you gonna distribute the final product?
MI: We’ll bedistributing it through as many of the libraries as we can on the Kenai, as well as, hopefully, bookstores, cafes, coffee shops — that sort of thing.
We also plan to do some public readings when and if possible.
KDLL: Are you going to submit anything for the first issue?
MI: You know, I wouldn't mind. But I've written a lot of things over the years, and the point of a journal like this is to get more voices out there, not fewer. So I'm very happy to sit back and just do the legwork of proofreading and putting together the final issue.
The thing that we're looking for is just a number of pieces across genre, across topics and subjects, and even writers of any age range, with the commonality being that they all live here on the Kenai. Because the more, different voices we can include, the more we can show how many facets there are to the place that we live.
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The final deadline for submissions to Volume for its inaugural issue is Feb. 28, to volumealaska@gmail.com. Iverson says the sooner submissions come in, the better.
Check out a list of guidelines here.
