Issue #02

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The Second Issue Blues

Welcome to the second instalment of SWAMP. You’ll see that the index for this issue is much larger than our first effort. That’s because we’ve had something like 4500 hits on the site since June, with a steady flow of them every day; and it has resulted in more than double the submissions for this difficult second issue, from five countries and over twenty diverse universities.

So, thank you; our brief from the start was to aim at an international publication, and, with your help, that’s exactly what we have established.

Our theme of Blue touched all the submissions in one way or another, whether by direct reference, as in Cynthia Wilson’s Purgatory, the overall tone of the piece, like Trip Back From Fires by Wally Humphries, or in the deliberate use of the colour to show its opposite – as Marina Alamo-Bryan did in All The Lies Inside The True Color Of Non-Blue.

We trust you’ll enjoy the results.

The official SWAMP launch is this weekend, October the 4th, and features in the Critical Animals program of Newcastle’s annual This Is Not Art (TINA) festival. That the SWAMP launch is in the Critical Animals section of the festival is appropriate, in that the Critical Animals program is set aside specifically for post-graduate students and early career academics – of which all the writers in this publication are a part.

This is the last issue for this year, but a call out for submissions for our next issue is not far away.

Keep reading, keep writing and try to stay virtuous; if you can’t, put all the details in a story and get it into our inbox, pronto.

Until next year,

Patrick Bryson
EDITOR

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