March 20, 2023

Dear Friends,

Another season has passed and Spring is here again! It’s hard to believe we’ve been curating our little corner of the literary landscape for almost six years now. This is our 23rd Issue of MoonPark Review, and it’s still just the two of us on the Masthead. We’ve woven the entire editorial process, from start to finish, into our daily lives in a way that suits us, and we’re proud to still call MPR “our literary baby.”

We usually spin our Editors’ Notes into a bit of personal musings, often involving seasonal change, with perhaps some veiled references to current events. This one will be more on the practical side.

Ever since we announced the birth of MoonPark Review in the summer of 2017, our primary space to promote our journal and our writers has been Twitter. We’ve loved being a part of “Literary Twitter”; it was a thriving virtual space for writers and other creatives for quite a few years. Our normal practice was to launch each new issue on the first day of the new season (spring equinox, summer solstice, fall equinox, and winter solstice) via a series of tweets: one for the whole issue and one for each story. Then periodically over the next three months we’d tweet out each story again, individually, with an “ICYMI” (in case you missed it) tag.

When we published Issue 22 three months ago, things were feeling pretty unstable over at the ol’ “blue bird.” For a while, it felt like the entire space might go up in flames. Followers were disappearing and our tweets seemed to find only a fraction of the audience they once did.  We didn’t like what was happening to the platform but we, like many in the Literary Twitterverse, have been holding on tightly to the community we’ve built there, and desperately don’t want to lose.

So, we launched Issue 22 on the winter solstice as normal but we didn’t do the series of ICYMI tweets throughout the winter months. We also opened an Instagram account and briefly thought we’d move our promotion to that space. But not being able to do links to individual stories is a significant limitation.

Now here we are at the launch of Issue 23. Twitter isn’t dead yet (though it has certainly been diminished) and there isn’t a clear alternative space yet. So, our plan going forward is to keep holding on at Twitter and see what happens. We will do our normal “launch day” tweets today, and we will be resuming our ICYMI tweets, too. But our ICYMI tweets will now highlight stories from the previous issue instead of the current one. So, Issue 22 contributors — we haven’t forgotten you! Your little prose gems will get some more promotion in the months ahead.

Okay, enough of the “business talk.” We’ve got a great line-up of sparkling new prose in this issue. Thanks to our contributors for sharing your beautiful, haunting, and inspiring words with us. We’re delighted to share them with the world.

With Gratitude,
Mary Lynn & Lesley Weston-Reed

 

Next