Welcome to Season 2
Issue 4 is finally here. We’re entering our second year of production, but in reality it is our third year as a magazine. Year 1 was spent creating the concept of the magazine itself, and then collecting submissions for our first issue. Year 2 we got into a bit of a rhythm, but it was still difficult with such a small editorial staff collecting submissions and doing the layout and design for another issue. Now we are in year 3 and we have a fourth issue of Funicular ready to enter a very different world. People are going to be talking about the pre-COVID-19 and post- COVID-19 worlds for years to come, which is fine because there isn’t one person on the planet who wasn’t somehow affected by what is still currently happening as we type these words.
The deadline for submissions for this issue was February 29, 2020. By mid-February we received a submission from someone originally from China who had written a poem as a sort of obituary for the doctor in Wuhan named Li Wenliang who was the first person to issue emergency reports about a mystery illness that we now know is COVID-19. Dr. Wenliang died on February 7, 2020. We decided not to publish this poem but we wanted to tell you about it because this is the kind of thing that was nipping at our heels as we put together Issue 4. Some of the stories and poems you read in this issue may hit you in a way that was not intended back when they were written months, or even years, ago. The world is a different place now. That sentence may already sound trite, but it is very much the truth that for all of us there is a line of things that came before, and the things that came after. The pieces in this magazine came before, but the issue came after.
As we present Issue 4 to you we are more committed than ever to the literature that you will read inside, and to the writers who have entrusted us with their work. We received more submissions for this issue than we have for any other issue so far. Which is why we were delighted to bring on former contributor Courtney Harler to review fiction, and Ellen Kartz from the Writers’ Guild of Alberta to review poetry. We absolutely would not have been able to get through the 1,000+ submissions we received without their keen eye, considered feedback, and determination to get through a large amount of reading during a time when we’re all understandably distracted.
We hope you enjoy what our team selected for you this time around, and thank you very much for your support.