No one ever asks you why a literary journal was started. This is just as well; I'm not sure what I'd say if they did. With hundreds upon hundreds of print and online journals already out there, rejecting writers faster than they can spellcheck their documents, you'd think the market would be cornered. But that's the beauty of it—hundreds and hundreds of editors at hundreds and hundreds of journals are still rejecting good work—work that didn't quite fit in with the rest of the issues' acceptances, work that doesn't quite fit the mission statement of the journal, work that doesn't sound like it was conceived in the bowels of a writing program in Iowa.
I started JMWW (Jen Michalski's Written World) originally as an organ to publish my own "in limbo" works, to give the greater public a chance to love or hate them while they sat in the slush pile of some journal office or another. Of course, that became old rather quickly, and it occurred to me that many other good writers, without the time or patience to run a site, needed a similar outlet. And some found us, bless them.
Although this premiere issue isn't the biggest, it's plenty diverse, with domestic authors from the east and west coast as well as writers from Canada and Britain writing in a variety of genres (literary fiction, sci-fi, rap). And that's another thing we'd like to boast—we're not bound to any genre, "feel," or idealogy. If we like it, we'll publish it, so send it, whatever it is. If you're proud of it, send it here. Make us work harder. Make us recruit more staff (we're currently looking for a poetry editor—a labor of love, but a fulfilling one, I hope), find a bigger server. Make me create a new e-mail address to deal specifically with your submissions. And finally, help us grow through the power of your work.