Can you tell me a little bit about Hearth & Coffin and your mission as a journal?

This is a project that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and it never seemed like the right time to do it—I’m sure there are plenty of people who can relate to really struggling to get on your feet and how it never feels like the right time to do your passion project. So for me there was a time when I was freelance writing for four publications, none of them paid well, and I was working as a barista—it was a mess. Finally, I was like I just need to jump in and do this. I’ve always wanted to provide a platform for writers who may have been underrepresented in the community, and I know I’m not the only one doing that. There are plenty of journals who want to promote voices like that, but I would love to be one of them. I wanted to put a place together, where, if you don’t have your name out there yet or you have trouble finding a place to publish your work, we want to be a stepping stone for people. We’ve also done social media promotion to regions where we don’t feel like there’s a lot of representation. We targeted regions like Nairobi and Lagos and received several submissions. There are journals based in Africa, but we don’t see a lot of representation in American journals from the entire continent. We want to see more representation from that area

What is it like to be entering the landscape of literary journals in this particular moment?

I think the current state of the world actually inspired us to get started. We put this together because we had this free time, and now the whole world is going through this pandemic together. At the beginning of the lockdown, a lot of people were getting creative, and it was a wonderful thing to see this air or resilience coming through—it was inspiring to see people in the face of all of this get creative and start writing these short stories or that novel that they’ve put off for years. I hope that creativity is holding out, and that we’re going to get work from people who maybe didn’t have time to write before, and they are now putting together the work they’ve always wanted to write

As a queer-owned journal, what kind of responsibility do you feel to the queer writing community and the writing community at large?

Now that I’m at the helm of a journal that publishes people’s thoughts, essentially, I need to help myself and my colleagues discern the stories that are important and need to be shared. Having diverse storytellers on our digital pages is imperative to me. Hence why we’re trying to collect stories from all over the globe, not just Houston or Texas or the United States. We want to make sure we’re giving voices to everybody

Each of your issues has a theme—to you, what is the value of starting with a theme?

We wanted to have themes in general because we do like to have some sense of order to each issue, and part of the fun of publishing diverse voices is you get so many interpretations of each theme, whatever it may be. We intentionally give no other instruction, we just give a word. Might what you think this word means be completely different from what this person across the country think it means?

How can readers support Hearth & Coffin?

We would love it if you gave us a follow on social media—we have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (@hearthandcoffin)—and read our journal! We would love if people shared the guest author pieces currently on our website on their social media. And please submit at submissions@hearthandcoffin.com.

www.hearthandcoffin.com