“Are you having any fun?”

I began to ask myself this question in a prospective advertiser’s ski gear shop, a few moments after he’d interrupted my spiel to say, “I don’t know, man. A writing magazine? Like, a magazine about writing? That sounds kind of gay.”

Of course, this whole thing—putting together a literary magazine by and for Montanans in some sort of self-important, cockamamie last stand against the death of print by way of algorithm—was never about curating advertisers only to then slap copy willy-nilly around their marketing. Plenty of local magazines take this approach already, churning out tired story after tired story of celebrities playing cowboy at their new Montana “ranches,” story after story chronicling some random guy’s unremarkable backcountry hut trip.

Still, advertiser rejections began to gnaw at me, however ironic. Not because I wondered, from then on, if every advertiser was fighting a mid-pitch urge to demean the work with a slur. People will think what they will. Act accordingly.

No, what had me bummed out was when I began to perceive these rejections as a proxy for public sentiment toward literary culture itself. “This isn’t a good fit for our customers,” was a common line. I contemplated what that meant, exactly. Don’t their customers read, albeit in addition to other sources of recreation and nourishment? Or do they fill their days plying YouTube and TikTok feeds for amusement until it comes time to ladle pap into their mouths again? The latter can’t be: Bozeman is chock-full of wonderfully curious, thoughtful, and present people.

As far as I can surmise, “reading” and “not a good fit” in the same breath reflects a broader trend, one to which remote Bozeman is no less susceptible: most people simply don’t give a piss about writing (verb) the way folks used to. Brands are prudent to recognize this. Sure, loads of people care about writing (noun), so long as the work is seeing traction on Goodreads or the protagonist is ravished with some regularity, but rarely with how the sausage is made. This feels somehow new, the literary equivalent to the average Netflix subscriber caring less and less about the artistic quality behind films and more and more about the efforts to keep their “binge” pile bottomless.

That’s enough railing against my deficiencies as a salesman packaged as a treatise on the decline of literary interest. It should be said many companies, both local and national, did get behind this effort with genuine earnest. Without any doubt, their support made this print run possible. I ask our readers to consider those ads as a representation of their legitimate patronage.

Shut up, man. What of the writing?

This project began with a call for entries. Scores of writers from around the state answered that call. Nearly one thousand times, in fact. Those pieces reflected a gamut of Montanan voices, from hardscrabble ranchers and small-town kids articulating that particular loneliness felt living at the edge of the known universe, to First Peoples, academics, so-called “transplants,” immigrants, blood-lusty hunters, and a good few who divulged their otherwise ineffable kinks.

Telling trends emerged. For one, the plurality of work concerned some facet of outer space physics or exploration, most often something to do with black holes—in particular, the raw, inescapable nothingness of them. Make of that what you will. I interpreted this as a call for silence, if not a fresh start far from the mechanics and dealings of planet Earth, if not plain nihilism. Apocalyptic tales claimed a close second in frequency. Think societal collapse ushering new rules and hierarchies favorable to primality. Intelligent technologies supplanting human influence, ecological collapse, grief and loss, and hand wringing over the uncertainty of our future made up the balance of common submission themes. The overwhelming majority of entries were tendered by women (to be more specific, and in more cultivated terms, by writers with typically feminine names). Encouragingly, we screened just one piece featuring suspiciously AI grammar. The “it’s not this … it’s that” crap so troublingly ubiquitous these days.

To winnow that pile to just thirteen finalists, our editorial team sought equal parts raw writing chops and a balance of style, voice, and topic. Our grand-prize essay grapples with meaning after life- altering assault. A fiction piece asks us to consider the discrepancies between our belief in angels and our perception of extraterrestrial beings. We published a story about a man who eats his friend’s fuzzy peach testicles, and another about getting even over a few too many pitchers of cheap beer and rounds of darts. Our grand-prize poet examines late-stage capitalism and the generational persistence of angst. We encounter the agony of cultural decay for those displaced by warfare. We learn how to love from a young woman who belly laughs while drinking a Budweiser Heavy, even as she suspects she’s the butt of an inside joke.

Perhaps that’s all we can do, laugh, when the laughter is at our expense. Thank you for the laugh, Mr. Ski Jacket Man, thank you. It’s all love. We’re having fun over here with our writing magazine.