Just saying

Issue #1 of Hot Metal Bridge launched over two months ago, but it continues to impress me. The astonishment comes in waves: first the insider’s swell of pride at the quality of (fiction) submissions; next the excitement of venturing into the other genres, seeing the excellent poetry and non-fiction my colleagues have collected. Now that the issue has faded from memory a little, the next stage is rediscovering stuff that, by the time the issue launched, I was honestly a little burned out on.

The best example? Johnathan Wilber’s “(de)jamais vu,” which gave me fits as I proofed it for the site–it’s a textual minefield full of particular accents, footnotes, punctuational flourishes, and selections from esoteric vocabularies. (My annoyance was nothing, however, as compared to that of Carolyn, who had to format the story for publication.) It was kind of a tough sell at HMB’s editorial meeting, and it’s not surprising: it’s a weird story, and with its fragmentation and the aforementioned excess of style, it can be tough to dive into.

But it remains one of my favorite things in the issue, largely because the weirdness and style feel necessary and embedded in the world of the story, and the fragmentation pays off in the end. But, looking through the site again, I came upon almost a distillation of all the things I like in the story: the separate page that contains “(de)jamais vu”’s footnotes. I could type a while longer trying to recommend the story, but I couldn’t make it seem as interesting as do these twelve short footnotes.

-Adam