If you are anything like me, you have seen maybe a million blurbs about "uplifting emerging writers" and "fostering community" on the front page of every other small litmag. I think these sentiments are good and perhaps some of them are achievable. But for the most part they are overblown and largely meaningless. I make no pretense about the nature of this magazine. L'AUTRE MOT exists because I think it is awesome and I wanted to make it. If there is any greater exigence for L'AUTRE MOT's existence it is only that every new avenue for letting art into our lives makes us richer and better in every meaningful way.
More importantly, every new motivation for the PRODUCTION of art, not just the consumption, is vital for our continued wellbeing. We spend so much of our artistic lives focusing on the consumption of art, and even when we make art so often it is in the lens and light of consumption. Even this magazine, despite all I am writing here, contributes to that. MAKING ART, making ANYTHING, is endlessly important for the soul and the mind and the heart. So, I ask you, as a favor, to do something before you submit to or read this magazine. Go find a piece of paper, and a pencil, and write, as quickly as you can, a poem. Then, before you have time to read it, DESTORY IT! Burn it, run it under the sink, tear it into a thousand little pieces. Anything. Good, bad, quality, these in art are real, but they are small ideas. You have now done something much larger, and perhaps, I hope, much harder to explain to yourself.
