Editor’s Note: We’re Going Down

Friends, enemies, lovers, strangers,

Happy May Day and welcome to Community Mausoleum. We thought we’d seize this occasion to introduce ourselves and attempt to describe some motives and aims of this project. A press, a journal, a website, a memorial. What?

Well, we confers a sense of collectivity and maybe even legitimacy, but we in this context is actually misleading. It’s just I, at least for now. Hi, my name is Zach Peckham and I’m the editor of Community Mausoleum, a publisher of doomed works and ephemera, and Coma, a journal of new writing and criticism focused on small press literatures. I live in Cleveland, Ohio where I work as an adjunct instructor at two institutions of higher education, and as an editor at an independent publisher and a literary magazine, respectively. You can look at the CV on my website if you want more specifics. I do not have health insurance.

I do however have a disease where the only way to keep working amid certain conditions of the world and the feelings they engender is to, well, do more work. Start another project. Make another thing. A press. A journal. Both. To this, one could ask, quite rightly: Does the world need more books? And, of course: Does the world need another literary journal?

The utopian answer to both is the same: Of course not. But that doesn’t matter because literature is not necessary. It serves no purpose other than to be literature, and it’s precisely this inherent rejection of value that makes it invaluable.

A more practical answer would be: Unfortunately, yes. In my limited travels and travails as a reader, writer, and editor I have seen the overwhelming evidence that while literature itself may not be necessary, additional and more particular outlets for it most certainly are. There is simply more affecting, invigorating, hilarious, horrendous, fucked up, singular, necessary writing being done than can ever be stuffed into vehicles of record and supposed merit as journals and books. There is far more adventurous, entertaining, razor-sharp, celebratory, eviscerating, ambitious, wild, crucial writing about writing and reading (i.e. “criticism”) on works that won’t get covered by traditionally respectable outlets being pitched and submitted for publication than can ever be considered or accepted by editors, proofed for print or screen, or budgetarily justified, financially or otherwise, by a board or department or group of friends with a shared email account and some spare time.

So, the publishing priorities of Community Mausoleum and Coma constitute a bifurcated yet unified response to conditions that have created these false scarcities, conditions that are recapitulated constantly by logics of reputation and legitimacy, mastheads and sales figures, release cycles, bylines, and other prestige- and profit-driven forces on both sides of the publication event horizon that define the literary landscape. Community Mausoleum is a publisher of doomed works. We refuse to help ourselves or make it make more sense. In addition to new poetry, prose, and translation, Coma endeavors to publish generous and generative critical writing about small press, micro press, nonpress, nonprofit, and no-profit literatures. If there was enough coverage of small press worlds in the world, we’d do something else with our time. Maybe take up golf or get on a consistent running schedule. Apply to some jobs. Finally work on our own writing.

There we go being a we again. While we’re here: one last thing. We have this theory. The theory is that the kind of writing we love, that we know is out there and isn’t being valued, isn’t just going undervalued. The problem, which is its own solution, is that it isn’t able to be valued anyway. We already know the economics of writing don’t make sense and the economics of publishing don’t either. This is perfect, because this kind of writing actually can’t be paid for at all. In some cases it may even reject compensation entirely. What would be the point? It’s invaluable, unvaluable. We’re talking about the kind of writing that wants to be written, that needs to be written and gets written no matter what. Not the kind that happens on a deadline, as a job, or for a fee.

Make sense? Didn’t think so.

But if you know what we mean, consider this your invitation. Pitch, submit, get in touch, be a reader. More soon. More later. No rush.

Time is on your side.

Zach Peckham
May 1, 2024

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