February 2017
By Sandra Tyler, Editor-in-Chief
Our first issue of 2017 is out! And it’s our first issue requiring a subscription—these subscription numbers are crucial to our long-term survival. Just enter your email and we will arrive once a month in your inbox. We remain forever (hopefully) free.
On other fronts: We published our first “Gallery Profile.” I’m particularly excited about this new facet to WTP, a way to bridge artists with galleries, and galleries with potential collectors online.
What is interesting about gallery sites, though, is that for the most part they exist as just that, a kind of virtual exhibition space; they offer little information about the actual curatorial. So for our profiles, we address questions whose answers we hope will shed some light on specifics, from bios of the curators, and what kind of art they seek, to actual price range of works. In this way, we aspire to individualize these galleries—artists and art buyers alike may turn to our WTP profiles to help sort through whom best to submit their work to, or seek to buy from. If you are a gallery interested in being profiled, you can email me directly at editor@thewoventalepress.net.
Another front: This week WTP is attending the AWP conference. If you’re one of our contributors or subscribers, come meet us at the book fair table 245-T. It would mean a lot to me personally to be able to meet some of you in person!
On a sadder note: We have lost one of our contributors, Mark Baumer, at the too-young age of 33. This was a writer who took risks, who trusted fully in his own quirky style and to wonderfully imaginative effects. He caught not only our notice but also The New Yorker’s. He was a particularly devout and brilliant blogger, and as Angelica Gonzalez noted in her WTP review, his website “hosts a truly amusing amalgam of offbeat poetry, wild dreams (“I had a dream I was on a game show. All the contestants were dripping from their pieces of hair”), and even actual scrawled “Dear Diary” entries…Baumer’s site is largely delightful entertainment. But it also offers up an impressive ‘Reading List’ page, spanning from Thich Nhat Hanh to Sam Pink…Baumer’s website is a goldmine of both his and others’ works.”
Baumer also was an activist, and at the time of our review, he told us he would soon be embarking on a trip across America—barefoot—to raise awareness of climate change and water shortages. He had just completed his 100th day of walking barefoot when he was hit by an SUV and killed. One of his last entries on the day of his death: “The day felt monumental not because it was my hundredth day of walking across America but because a man who hates everything except himself (or any other rich white man) will be free to burn the world for profit. We now have a president who does not care about the future of humanity on planet earth.”
You can read his work in Vol. IV #8.
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