From the Editor For a moment, think of online, literary magazines as interior design. There are the musty parlors with silver thimble collections, needlepoint pillows from Niagara Falls, the Ladies Auxiliary sipping tepid tea. There are industrial lofts, concrete and gunmetal, black leather and chrome, a few, angular youths staring into pierced navels. There are the romper rooms, mermaid wallpaper and soft foam rounding every sharp corner, and there are reeducation camps, miles of barbed wire and sallow-skinned moderators incessantly sloganeering.
Where does Avatar Review fit? Consider it Gaudí's ventricle of the absurd - disturbing, amusing, adept at simultaneous repulsion and attraction. Notice the trap doors and secret passages, the jars filled with otherworldly objects, the flamenco dancers, the witch doctor. Can you hear the thump of djembe pulsing through that wall? Those are the poets. The fiction writers bustle in the kitchen, plopping dollops of batter onto a hot griddle. The artists? Occasionally, you will see them scamper from room to room, laughing at mirrors.
Visit longer than a quarter of an hour, I insist. Explore. There is more here than a parlor or loft or daycare center. The magazine, Avatar Review, is a rotunda with many doors, portals to an unpredictable architecture of creativity. Where one day you stand in a serene alcove filled with chrysanthemums, the next you find yourself in an underground maze, lemurs whizzing by on the backs of komodo dragons. Eric Woodgates, BCE
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