(Last) Letter from the editor 2015
Greetings wonderful reader,
First of all I would like to say that after 10 years of presiding over this wondrous journal of art and letters I am resigning. It’s not that I don’t love the editing process, I actually do. For reals: I edited my undergrad lit journal, The Atlantis, and my grad school journal, The Cold Mountain Review. Then when I moved out to California in 2000, I began editing the Homestead Review out of Hartnell College in Salinas, where I accepted a position on their faculty.
Then Magnus Torén asked me if I’d like to take on Ping-Pong, a small publication which featured essays that had been out of circulation for 10 years. I said no for at least a year or two, then I finally said I’d do it, but would change the format to be an international journal of art, poetry, fiction and lots of translations–if some like minded folks would sign up with me, and they did. The original crew consisted of Dan Linehan as managing editor; Jerrold Simon, as creative director; James Maughn as poetry editor; and Jessica Breheny as fiction editor. I would be jack-of-all-trades and oversee everything as the EIC. It’s a lot of work. Everyone from the original crew retired early on to work on their own writing and have since published incredible books. What all writers know and what almost no one else does is just how much time it takes to produce a work worth publishing. It’s not the writing, we all write, it’s the time it takes to edit something you’d be proud enough to share in a cohesive collection, at least for me. I am now carving out a bit of that time for myself.
I am quite proud of the work I have done in support of other artists. My heroes have always been those artists who have supported other artists: Anaïs Nin, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, even that crazy fuck Ezra Pound: we are not as large a community as one might think.
And I have not given up the desire to publish those whose voices need to be heard. With the launch of Ping-Pong Free Press in 2016, the Henry Miller Memorial Library will begin to publish full-length manuscripts, and I will serve as Editor-in-Chief of this enterprise. I think it will afford me a bit more time to work on my own writing. I am not in a hurry. It’s only that I have so many of my own pretties that need my attention.
I would like to thank all of the writers we’ve published over the years, and also the editors who have made this publication one of the best ever produced: Christine Hamm, River Atwood Tabor, Jennifer Lagier-Fellguth, Joanna Fuhrman, Shelley Marlow, Buffy Hastings, J. Hope Stein, Jenny Donegan, Katherine Hargreaves and Brooke Hankins. You are all super talented and generous to everyone you meet. It’s been a rare privilege to work with you.
I have included their work in an Editor’s Folio here. Enjoy!
Hot frogs,
Maria Garcia Teutsch
To purchase please go here: Ping-Pong 2015
