Shawn Rossiter wrote a review in 15 Bytes magazine
of The Nomad Literary Magazine’s new "Breakthroughs"
issue. During our Zoom "flash-reading" on May 19, editor Rachel White
noted that the review was accurate but not entirely complimentary. Here's how
it opens:
THE NOMAD’s Issue 4, “Breakthroughs,” is more about the through than the break. There are few explosive moments, not many trumpet blasts. Instead, the issue gathers fiction, memoir, lyric essay, prose poem, and poetry—fifty-four pieces by twenty-seven writers—around breakthrough as passage, as a moving through.
15 Bytes is a publication of
the Artists of Utah in Salt Lake City. The Nomad is based in
Bountiful, Utah. Rossiter goes on to describe some of the stand-out Nomad pieces.
Rossiter had praise for Shari Zollinger's piece which she read at the May 19
event:
Shari Zollinger’s “Found” gives the issue one of its purest formal breakthroughs. The essay enters “psychedelic space” through a microdose on the morning of an eclipse—Alice falling through, the red pill and blue pill hovering at the edges—and searches backward along memory’s “thread-gauzy timeline” for a self left waiting in a Taipei hospital. The strangeness of the piece, its Alice-and-Matrix layering, its eclipse-as-wormhole logic, enacts a consciousness genuinely working at the borders of what language can hold. What is found is not restored intact. Instead, the abandoned self is allowed to burn, scatter, and become movable. “It was okay to let a piece of me die,” Zollinger writes. “It was okay to blow away.” Her author’s note makes the connection explicit: the piece itself emerged from a breakthrough into the lyric essay, “at the crossroads between breakdown and breakthrough.” Form and subject meet as the essay’s fragmented, luminous movement enacts the kind of healing it describes.
That's
the key to Rossiter's interest and I thank him for the attention. As a
retired arts administrator, I respect anyone's desire to be part of an arts
non-profit. It is a constant struggle. Funding comes from a State Arts Agency
(SAA) or Local Arts Agency (LAA), sometimes a Regional Arts Organization (RAO),
which is WESTAF in the West. Also memberships and subscriptions and any local funding the org can muster.
The
National Endowment for the Arts is in there, either through one of these
agencies or directly, with applications to the NEA.
For those of us paying attention, all of these entities have been under the gun
since Jan. 20, 2025. Funding is tight. Some private foundations have stepped in to relieve shortfalls.
All of
this is important. I may not have the exact lay of the land because I've
been retired from day-to-day arts-funding functions for 10 years as I wrote and published a historical novel. I also still submit to lit mags via
Submittable or directly to places where I know editors, such as The
Nomad. Thanks Rachel and her business partner, the traveling poet/musician
Ken Waldman, now somewhere in Texas.
The poets and writers on our May 19 Zoom gathering all have interesting stories to tell. Their ages and backgrounds are revealed on the Nomad web site, and their stories are their own to tell. The challenge is to make it interesting for the reader. In a way, every poem and story is a breakthrough for the author. Every literary magazine is a breakthrough into imagination.
