Online Mag Welcomes the Weird and Wonderful
After the Pause is a quarterly online literary journal based in Indianapolis, IN. It offers a blend of conventional and experimental work, including poetry, flash fiction, and art. According to Editor-in-Chief Michael Prihoda’s interview at Duotrope, After the Pause loves “weird things that still have a point and connect us to the human experience.” The journal gives its purpose in the issue as well, saying it believes “art is a product of life experiences, from the joyful to the heartbreaking to the absolutely mundane.”
The contents of After the Pause are eclectic. The Summer 2017 issue, at ninety pages, includes nine flash fictions, forty poems, and fourteen photos or illustrations. Flash fictions are narrative in nature, running 1-3 pages. Poetry runs the full gamut: free verse, erasures, blackouts, prose-poems, concrete, and highlighters. There is a visual artist feature, eight pages, which juxtaposes photos and verse.
The summer issue illustrations start on the cover, a drawing of a howling wolf in a wintry, blue, leafless forest. It is vexingly titled “The Fox,” by Spandan Banerjee, whose contributor statement says “art is not what we see, but what we make others see.” Touche! That ended my objection. The most interesting illustration, “Vanishing Point” by Helen Burke, features tall buildings converging in the sky from a street POV. There is no contributor information provided for Burke, and I’d have liked to known more. It is a colorful counterpoint to the facing page of text.
David J. Thompson has two photos, “Oldsmobile” of an abandoned car, and “What’s Playing” of some time-worn and faded show bills. The featured artist, Rawquel, provides a pleasant respite in the middle of the issue. This Portuguese artist juxtaposes photos of spoons, forks, knives, and everyday objects (bread, flowers, jars) with companion bits of verse.
Flash fiction on offer includes a wonderful, compressed meditation on the loss of a child by the widely published writer Tommy Dean. In “Rarely Appearing in Body,” Dean sets the pace via reference to uneaten fruit on a kitchen counter, opening with “Eight days later, the bananas turned from yellow to brown to black,” then at the end after the distraught and suffering family members have been fleshed out, “the oxygen infiltrates the peel, making the meat of the fruit gooey, and unstable.”
There are some very strong poems included, covering a range of themes and topics. I especially liked the blackouts of Frankenstein by Erin Hall (“a poet from the Midwest who loves karaoke and collage”). In “Frankenstein 3” we learn “With anxiety the eye breathed catastrophe arteries formed accidents of desire horror rushed out wild.” “Frankenstein 8,” tells the following: “the silent calamities whose existence could not be extinguished lived in the wicked past I would wreak horror delight was destroyed with ecstasy.”
Leah Brand (no contributor note provided) has two poems included, “California Gurls: Pioneers of Fourth Wave Feminism,” which examines the modern woman’s plight through the lens of a Katy Perry video. “Sheep Wranglers” offers a more private view.
Beyond those hills the smoke eats your lungs
and the brush is bathing in flames.
Her eyes are blue salvation.
She smiles, and the leaves are golden.
She laughs, and you love her more.
You’ll burn later. The smoke will flatten your ribs,
your bones will char, and the last thing you’ll know
is the wind in her ear.
There are a lot of innovative online journals to choose from, and the innovation comes not from content but from how the content is packaged, how the personality of an individual magazine comes through and controls the content. After the Pause seems the product of a light hand at the reins. The magazine has a certain raw energy, a chorus of emerging voices thriving on encouragement.
Beside the contents being an interesting mix of seasoned and new voices, it’s worth noting a few observations about how it’s all packaged. Some design choices, including not numbering the pages (they are alphabetic, through page lll), having no table of contents, and putting cryptic bios up front, were a bit off-putting. A pet peeve of mine, when viewing artworks online, arises when there is no mention of dimensions, dates, or materials used. Because the Issuu reader did not allow downloads, printouts, or even the selection of one work, it might be hard for individual contributors to share, or help publicize the issue.
The tone of some contributor statements (“Here’s looking at you, kid,” “A Mexican-American who is afraid to shop at Whole Foods,” “Would rather be in Spain”) bespeaks a youthful editorial attitude. Some contributors go unlisted. The issue introduces the bios as “effigies, simulacra, and representations” that show “but shadows of the visceral body behind the fingers of these sculpted creations.” I’m not sure I get it, but these statements not only reveal little, but also do not provide avenues of contact between contributor and reader.
One interesting observation from the contributor notes is that After the Pause is welcoming of international submissions. Talent from India, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Turkey joins with American voices from all points on the map.
According to its Duotrope listing, After the Pause is one of the fastest fiction markets, averaging 4.5 days for a response. After the Pause currently considers submissions on a rolling basis, and has a 4.5 percent acceptance rate. The journal publishes four times yearly electronically, and from this publishes an annual print anthology whose proceeds go to charity. This is not a paying market.
