This is our last issue. Thanks for reading it. It is big. It has a lot of poetry. Some of these are solicited all-stars from past issues, or just writers we've long admired. Some of them submitted to our 24-hour open submission period. We've put out ten (and a half) issues in 2 years and feel pretty good about that, but it is time to close up shop. This magazine is hand-coded from text files (using my circa 1999 html knowledge) and is kind of a pain in the butt to put together, and after our fiction editor, Meghan Lamb, left I decided I'd get a few people to help me finish up what we had started (namely issues 9 and 10) and just call it a good run. I want to thank Matthew Baker Thompson for editorial contributions to issue 9 and for doing some awesome html grunt work for issues 8 and 9. I want to thank Jeannette Gomes and Corey Zeller for editorial contributions to issue 10 and Cassandra Gillig for helping me read fiction submissions during the 24 hour submission blitz. And of course I want to thank Meghan Lamb for co-founding and co-editing Red Lightbulbs with me for so long. To everyone who has contributed or read us: damn, guys. You are amazing. I never thought anyone would care about this, but a lot of people did, and still do, and that's amazing. You guys are awesome. I love you all. If you want more where this came from, I have been running love symbol press along with Jeannette Gomes and a few fantastic interns, where we're putting out echapbooks and real life print books in very, very small runs. Jeannette & I are also running a reading series at Uncharted Books in Logan Square called POETRY MADE OF DIAMONDS. I may have some other editorial/magaziney type venture in the future, but I haven't really done work in that direction as of yet. So I guess for now it's goodbye, and I'll see you around. It was fun.
Best,
Russ Woods