Yorick Magazine

Dear readers and patrons of our little magazine,

I am regretfully announcing our decision to definitely close submissions for Yorick Magazine. This was not an easy choice to make. This was not a digestible idea at first. This was not how we pictured Yorick at the end of 2013.

But there should be no tears but smiles at the finish of this road. Admire yourselves for having the bravery to submit your work and extend your mind to ours. When the magazine began, I had no expectations that there would be such a community to follow this jester of an experiment. I have more faith in the online literary world than I ever had and ever knew. Thank you.

Thanks also to Lauren Wainwright for your layout, design, and graphic productions for this magazine, as well as being a great manager to our staff. You were a fantastic help and a backbone for Yorick.

Thanks to Olivia Errico, Dean Terrell, Sam Levenberg, and Ed Jameson for your amazing work respectively editing, “social-mediating,” writing content for Yorick, and producing The Skullcast. You were a bliss to work with.

Thanks to Jeremiah Walton for your indelible efforts to promote and support Yorick. Cheers!

Thanks to the other literary publications that associated with Yorick, especially The Gap-Toothed Madness, for your ability to share the literary space we tread online.

And, so importantly, thanks to Cody Steinhauer for the wonderful idea. You didn’t know it at the time, but your drunken plans for a magazine brought all these people together.

The website will stay up as long as WordPress exists. The online issues, too, will remain as long as Issuu.com exists. When we find the funding, print issues of the Summer and Fall 2013 issue will be sent out to contributors.

It was a pleasure serving you all.

Best,
Alex

THE STORY BEHIND YORICK MAGAZINE

Yorick Magazine  began on the scummy floor of a bathroom in Tuckerton, New Jersey. It was November 2011, and I received a call late one night, around 1:30 am or so. I was a night owl, so I felt the call was a wondrous occasion. I picked up and hear a drunken voice.

“Alex, I want to start a magazine. Can you be the editor-in-chief?”

I wasn’t exactly stunned. The voice was Cody Steinhauer’s, a man whose similarity to Hunter S. Thompson is surreal and uncanny. We’d always shared fiction and poetry, and though this was a step towards a direction I’d favored highly, it didn’t surprise me one bit that he’d make this proposition at 1:30 in the morning. It was perfect.

“Absolutely. Can we call it Yorick or something?”

I’d always had a sick fascination with the jester Yorick of Hamlet fame. Finding a skull of a former playmate. Yikes! Yorick always reminded me of Poe’s deformed and titular jester, Hopfrog, as well, invoking a sinister storyteller with a taste for drama and aesthetics (recall the burning “ourang outangs.”) So I pursued the name almost instantaneously.

“Yeah, sure.”

A few minutes later, we finished the call, and dreams of a new, online magazine promptly began. Cody later explained where he made the call, and I told him I would have done the same. We all have drunken bathroom floor dreams–I’ve had plenty. It’s just a matter of pursuing them that separates substance from untamed ambition.