Just a quick update this morning from the North Dakota Quarterly office. Issue 86.3/4 is back from the copy editors and authors have received their edited work for review and final changes. Once I receive all the poems, stories, and essays back from the authors, I’ll set them in the order that they will appear in the volume and send them off to our publishing parts at the University of Nebraska Press.
This is a pretty exciting time in NDQ workflow. Not only am I drawn to read, once more, all of the remarkable contributions to the journal, but I also get to think about how they might talk to one another through their arrangement in the printed issue. Part of the simple pleasure of reading a literary journal is the juxtaposition of various stories and essays and poems. I’ve been thinking a bit about parataxis in my own work, and I suspect that the arrangement of contributions to NDQ has helped me think about the way in which meaning is created through the sometimes casual arrangement of ideas, texts, and images.
In the spirit of parataxis, then, I offer a few possible cover images from Ryan Stander, our art editor at NDQ. I think a number of these evoke juxtapositions present in the pages of little magazines.
North Dakota Quarterly 