First post, SPLAT Art Magazine on hiatus, new poetry interviews

A little over a year ago, my friend Ryan Warner and I started collaborating on an 'underground' arts magazine called SPLAT. It's a great little labor of love/vanity project that we worked really hard on and are very proud of. But around May, which would have been the magazine's first anniversary, the labor aspect overtook the love aspect of putting together an new issue every couple of months. Ryan started looking for new jobs, my son turned two and went a little terrible on us, and so we found our obligations to daily life overwhelming our devotion to the magazine, and we went on hiatus. For the summer only, we're promising ourselves.

And I hope that's true because I loved working on a magazine. Most of my writing life I've made poems or written critical papers about poems and poets, so it was a refreshing change of pace to do some thing journalistic  interviewing poets and organizing our conversation into cohesive, personal narratives about poetry, art, and life in general. In fact, I've been missing the thoughtful, creative conversations I had with Toledo's poets, and find myself thinking a lot about the poets I didn't get to talk to yet. So, while SPLAT is on its hopefully brief hiatus, I'm going to continue the interview series I started a little more than a year ago here, at this blog. I'll post links to old interview in previous issues SPLAT, and maybe catch up with a few poets I've already talked to. Maybe someone has a new chapbook or complete collection they'd like to promote, or maybe there's a new magazine accepting submissions. I'll try to make this a destination for poets and poetry lovers of all types. I'd like to also share book reviews, maybe some recipes, drawings, and maybe some "What I've been up to" journal type entries. We'll see how things play out. I hope you'll visit often.

In the meantime, I have an interview to post that was supposed to be, and still might be, in the latest issue of SPLAT, whenever it comes out, and I'm going to post that ASAP. I just have to work out some details with Ryan. While you're waiting, here's a link to the interview I did with Matt Sradeja: http://issuu.com/splatartmagazine/docs/splatartmagazine.nov.dec.2011