Hello reader, welcome back. I meant to have this post up last week but I was traveling. I was in Chicago for my brother and his fiancé’s baby shower. How exciting! For them. Anyways, we have some really exciting news this week and a few updates to our contributor corner. As it turns out we have contributors who are actual legitimate working writers. Who knew!

First things first, where is RABBLE REVIEW No.10? You asked, angrily. First of all, please lower your voice. Second of all, that is a reasonable question. It’s not here. But it is coming! We’re aiming for a release later in the summer. Right now we’re still in the review stage, but we are officially finished with the reading. We have read every submission, voted on them, and are moving to the next stage. But before I detail that, here is how much our small team of five had to read:

We had 272 individuals submit work.

We had a total of 584 text works submitted. Of that 584 we had 29 nonfiction works, 55 fiction works, and 500 poems submitted.

We had a total of 34 visual works submitted.

Does that math add up? I don’t know, ask our spreadsheet.

So it took us almost four months to read through everything AND discuss the works. We started reading in January after the holiday (our submission window closed at the end of November.) If you did submit work we apologize for the wait, we know that some of you have been waiting since the submission window opened at the end of October. And you’ll have to wait a little longer because we still have not finalized our picks for the issue.

For a little bit more behind the scenes, we are actually debating if we want to split this submission pile in half so we can use it for another twin issue. We have done this before. RABBLE REVIEW No.5 and No.6 were created from the same submission pile, which is why they released so close to each other.

It always feels bad to reject a work that we love but have no room for, so if we can cheat a bit and find a way to include it in say, Issue 11, that would be rad. But we are still organizing the works that survived round one.

With that said, we have a lot of works that sadly did not survive the first wave of votes. Some of these were works that felt unpolished, some of these are works that just don’t fit the vibe. And sometimes we get works that are baffling, like, did you read our mission statement? Hell, read one of our back issues, they’re free and readily available! Our entire editorial team is made up of far left working class leftists, we are not right, right of center, center right, far right, none of that. So just make sure you read the description. I doubt anyone subscribed to the RABBLE REVIEW newsletter is shocked to learn that, but there were a few submissions that had us scratching our head. Like, “why did you think we would publish this? We abhor this worldview,” levels of discourse. It’s…nuts.

If you do receive a rejection letter please don’t overthink it. As you can see we had a very competitive submission cycle this round. Our team also grew by two people which changes the discussion especially since the two additions are not cis-men. So a diversity of thought will change the direction our decision making goes, and that is a good thing. And while I have no idea what the final issue will look like, the works we are still deciding between are all strong, and we think it will end up being a compelling, stirring, and rousing work of literature. We can’t wait for you to read it!

We will be back soon with more updates. In our last newsletter we teased another live show. We have pushed the date back, we’re hoping to do it in June once we have (hopefully) finalized our final list. We also (maybe) will be tabling at an event happening in May. For those of you in the Southern California region, keep your eyes peeled, we will share more info in the next newsletter if this ends up coming together!