Emily C. Skaftun: Managing Editor

They say the definition of insanity is to try the same action over and over again, expecting different results. In other words, they say that it’s natural and healthy for human beings to be discouraged. Writers, however, are a different breed. We plaster our walls with rejection letters (and it takes a long time, when each one is the size of a bookmark or a coat check ticket), and we send our words out again.

Are we insane? Maybe.

When the wall of rejection begins to get me down, I find myself thinking crazy thoughts. Maybe you should go to business school, they whisper to me. Or learn to drive a tractor trailer. In my darkest times I’ve even filled out applications at Pizza Hut or Blockbuster Video. My thoughts tease me, saying you could be managing the place within a year.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), these hare-brained schemes of mine always fizzle out when I remember the advice of an early writing teacher: “If you can be happy doing anything else, do that. If you can’t, be a writer.”

To be fair, there are a number of occupations to which this rule applies, endeavors that require a certain amount of insanity to pursue: actor, painter, astronaut, to name a few. Which brings me to this, the inaugural issue of Michigan Avenue Review. Why do we launch one more journal into a seemingly bleak literary world, already over-stuffed with literary magazines and sparsely populated with readers? Will we be rewarded for our enterprise? Who will need all this literature in the world of the future? Who will look beyond the ever-more-elaborate slogans printed on our coffee sleeves, the sports section, and the T.V. times?

Well, apparently you will, and we certainly thank you for that. We’d even like you to enjoy it.

But let me let you in on a little secret: Michigan Avenue Review isn’t really for you, it’s for us. We haven’t founded this journal to make money. We’re not doing it to fill a need or to make a point. We’re not doing it because of popular demand. We send this fledgling journal out into the hostile world partly because we’re insane, but there’s more to it than that.

Like writing, we do it because we have to. Because we can’t be happy doing anything else.

Jim McCarthy: Senior Editor

I can’t remember the exact amount of times that someone has given me a book, a magazine, or an article along with the words “read this.” And I have, and I am still pretty much waiting to be disappointed. I trust the opinions of the people when it comes to recommending what to read. Who hasn’t read a book they want to be buried with, one that they would have never heard of if not for the good word of another?

We leaf through the pages of whatever we find in front of us, looking for the things that put it all together. No one knows for sure what exactly that is, but when it pops up, we feel like we have always known it was there. Most likely it’s the words that do it, but an image that appears from words can work just as well. And then we talk about it, and pass it on. Something is out there, and we can’t keep silent about it.

Really, we don’t want to keep silent about it.

Which is exactly what we hope happens here. These pages come from us to you, and we think that they are worth reading. We politely request that you do. We think you will like them. You might even love some of them. And then you’ll pass them on. Maybe you will even want to be on them the next time. Then people can pass you on. It all makes for suck a lovely cycle.

Nicholas Tate: Editor

Growing up, music always played a major role, influence, and crutch in my life. There’s something in the nature of music, maybe the intangibility, or the thorough expression of thoughts and emotions, that grasped me. Possibly it is the immediate stimulation it has over the mind and body, like cold water to a parched throat or a wet rag to a feverish forehead. In an instance we may be recklessly driven towards climax only to be found swimming in a transient melody, lulled in a reminiscent revere decaying into silence.
Music is a momentary fix, an impermanent experience which may excite or soothe through contrast or parallel of our own moods. Music involves both the creator and the listener, uniting them through melody, harmony, tempo, and even meaning or intent to create and mature a relationship through cause and effect that both may take can give something for both to take away from.

Music is only a subcategory of art. Art is essentially created through such momentary expressions, though using different aspects for its creation. Writing for instance, as with music, is truly and primarily an interaction between the artist and audience. Whether through cacophonous word sounds, vivid images, or any other literary convention, the audience receives and interprets what is presented into their own frame of reference that can denote or connote importance, relevance and personalize the experience. What we take away has little to do with the author, but rather what we receive is telling of our priorities. It does not work any other way. The mechanisms of meaning in any art are memory, interpretation and comprehension. These are what make art relevant and important, and they take form in the personal experience.

Literature, being art, abides to this and is ruled by it. We write to express our interests and our messages to others and through this leave an effect upon the world. Through our crafts we may expand the worlds of others, and just maybe our own borders too, will swell.

The theme chosen for this issue is an important one, it calls for an expression of ideas concerning constructions of humankind. Our society and our views about the society we have created, helped create, or wish to shape differently. It is my hope that the pieces we have chosen may expand the boundaries of the city and the urban life in your world.

Ron Estrada: Editor-in-Chief

I know that there’s an apartment. That this apartment is a smaller place, and that there is one lamp in it. At this particular time, that the lamp-light given off is yellowish, maybe because of the lampshade being older and yellowed itself, maybe because of the type of bulb, maybe because of the walls. That, to be sure of, I don’t know. I know that there is one woman in this apartment, and that she’s sitting by a desk. I know that the desk and the light and the bowls in the sink, along with other distinctions around the room, begin to reflect on the personality/living situation/income/relationship status of the woman sitting at the desk, who, oh, yeah, is in a loose t-shirt, long enough to cover the tops of her legs. The only activity she’s showing is in her rubbing her first finger around on the desktop, though the aloofness of her motion really questions that “activity.” No, I don’t know which hand is moving. Okay, fine, it’ll be the left one. This desk. I keep coming back to it and there’s something interesting there. No, I do not yet know how/where/from who she got it. Standing in the hallway, on the other side of the entrance door to the woman’s apartment, is a man. This man has been leaning against the doorframe for a bit of time. I know he’s a neighbor. He wants to knock on this door, but something is stopping him from doing so. Nope, not yet sure I know what exactly it is that’s stopping him. Although, too, I’m wondering if I specifically need to know. I know that the woman has all of a sudden sprouted in her desk chair and has begun to write something on loose paper. She’s begun to smile. The aura surrounding her, for me as the writer or audience, has changed. It’ll be explored more. I know that the man standing outside her door has begun to well-up and now I know that he has taken the woman’s place in my empathizing. Something about the man reminds me of my uncle/a guy I once saw at Sea World/that skinny maintenance worker in my apartment building/that little alien from that book I read when I was nine or something. And the woman, absolutely, reminds me of what’s-her-name from college….or, um, um, um…jeesh, I’m not sure. But something. I know that there are individual futures and pasts to these two people and maybe they share those or, eventually, will share them.

Although, really, I don’t know. Completely.

Some writers say that they don’t know what they’re going to write until they see it on the page in front of them. That allows writing to be a moment of semi-constant epiphany. (“Semi-constant.” Writing is a discovery process, yes, though very much calculated, as well.) So as they write, they reveal. But within this process of revelation, there has to be conscious caution taken by the writer not to over-disclose. The artist who can do this properly will be the one who makes what they offer to the world accessible and interactive. Everybody sees the world differently, slightly to totally, which makes it all but impossible to see anything in the exact same way as the person next to us. We collectively live in the same world, though with our own individual filtration systems, and, therefore, really, each live in our very own world. I may meet Francine at the grocery store, and, while in line for the deli, we get to talking, and agree that blue is the best color in the spectrum because it reminds each of us of the Pacific Ocean, specifically, off the south coast of Maui, especially around June—mid June, when the water is a little more active and collides hard with that one lava formation just near the Sheraton hotel, which, by the way, makes the best Mai-Tai’s on the island. We can agree on a thousand consecutive facts related to the same topic and instance, though we will never fully know what the other person thinks and feels about this topic.

Writers write because we have something to say. We see the world in our unique way, and can’t wait to tell everyone about it. I know that blue is the best color in the spectrum because it reminds me of the Pacific Ocean and so on, so on, so on. And I want you to know that, too. Though, again, nobody else will ever really understand the writer, no matter the writer’s talent, because they just can’t. And it’s not limited to the non-understanding of the writer-to-reader relationship. The writer, too, can never fully understand. There are no exemptions. They’d like to think so, and support it with reasoning of it’s their creation. But any writer knows that the thickness—even of their own created character—has limitless thickness, and that that character will—just as us living, breathing, stumbling around Earth—continually surprise us. Who can know about surprises that haven’t been popped yet?

Nobody.