Winter of '93-94 (Albuquerque, NM):
To say that I didn't like my job is an understatement.
I was a restaurant manager in the northeast heights and worked for a man who's management style bordered on dictatorial. So I worked--a lot.
Brian E. Scott was one of my bartenders, and John Dunkin was my daily Gin & Tonic drinking regular.
As Brian and I worked and John drank, we talked. I still hung on to my ambitions: a writer, magazine editor, budding novelist. Brian wrote too, and John, an engineer at Sandia Labs, always wanted to do more. So we launched Signature: Writing of the New West--basically meeting on the shifts that Brian and I worked together.
None of us knew what we were doing, but we hatched the plan: create a flyer and send it to the various colleges (in the Rocky Mountains and southwest) asking for submissions, collect submissions, publish a magazine.
After struggling to get submissions, we finally collected enough for our first issue and went to press: 100 issues at probably $2.00 an issue for production and sold at $3.00. None of us had a lot of money to publish a literary magazine nor did we want to dump very much money into it. We did love writing, but was there a market for it? Turns out that there wasn't much of one.
The magazine landed with a horrendous thud. Since I, literally, worked all the time, I didn't have a chance to push it at the various open mikes that were springing up in ABQ. Brian was still in school trying to finish up his degree and cultivating a dangerous habit. John had a family and spent his free time drinking in my bar.
Eventually I quit managing restaurants; Brian moved on to UNM; and John died. My ambitions of being a literary magazine editor, for the most part, died as well. My lone copy of the magazine languished in a filing cabinet until I pulled it out the other day. And, while the production standards were a bit on the cheap side, the writing held up remarkably well.
Then I thought, what if I published a 2nd issue, but did it online? What would it look like today?
