The penultimate thing that I do before submitting an issue of North Dakota Quarterly to our publisher, the University of Nebraska Press, is write my editor’s notes. Since I’ve only done this twice, I don’t have a very firm grasp of the genre, and I’m never sure whether I should be lyrical and poetic or matter of fact. As a result, I tend to be awkward, but in some ways this is how I roll.

Here’s my Editor’s notes for NDQ 86.1/2.

Editor’s Note

Projects like North Dakota Quarterly depend on their community to survive. The members of the NDQ community offers us their writing, and they give us their time by reading what we write, edit, and produce. In some case, they even give us material support by subscribing to the journal.

In 2017, we decided to suspend accepting new individual subscriptions to NDQ. We were worried that budget shortfalls would make it difficult to service new individual subscriptions while still maintaining our longstanding institutional subscribers. It was a tough to decide to continue to accept institutional subscription, but we felt that each volume in a library might reach more readers than those in individual hands and, in this age of austerity, that it would be hard to convince libraries to renew a dropped subscription. We also hoped that our individuals subscribers would come back to the Quarterly when we regained our financial footing.

With issue 86.1/2, we once again welcome individual and institutional subscribers. At the same time, we recognize that not all of our readers can afford to subscribe to NDQ or haven’t decided whether to support our remarkable community in a material way. As a result, we’ll do all we can to make the content of NDQ available to everyone on our website. If you like what we do, however, and can afford an NDQ subscription, we ask that you do subscribe to support the community of readers, writers, and editors who make NDQ what it is. At the same time, if you like what you read, we encourage you to submit your creative work. Finally, let us know what you think of the Quarterly, whenever the spirt moves you, by dropping me a line at billcaraher@gmail.com.

Finally, we hope you enjoy this double-issue’s remarkably diverse content which includes five stories and five essays as well as over 50 poems. The final section of the issue is a tribute to the late Bill Gass edited by Crystal Alberts. The range of moods, styles, and themes present in this issue of the Quarterly traces the contours of our community, and I look forward to continuing to do my part to ensure that it thrives.

~

The final thing that I do before sending an issue of NDQ to our press is to review our content to get a sense for how the volume breaks down.

Volume 85, which is out at the printers looked like this:

UNP measures the length of a volume by character counts. Volume 85 was 430,000 characters. So, by character, NDQ 85 was 52% non-fiction largely owing to the special section on the Humanities in the Age of Austerity. 29% fiction and 18% poetry. By number of contributions, it was an even 12% for non-fiction and fiction and 76% poetry. Men wrote 75% of the content, which is too high, but basically representative of our pool of submissions. This is something that we need to fix.

The first double issue of volume 86, numbers 1/2, will clock in at around 425,000 characters (whatever that means) and include 5 short stories (32% by character count), 6 non-fiction pieces (21%), and 51 poems (20% which is probably inflated a bit since even a short poem counts as a page or 1700 characters), plus a section guest edited by Crystal Alberts on Bill Gass (26%). There are 48 authors (71% by men), and 76 submissions (68% by men).