Kickstarter

It is hard for us not to sit down hard on our tailbones, breath rushing out of us as from a balloon, untied, when we stand in front of booth #902 at Wordstock at the Oregon Convention Center (Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. both days).

We made this. We made -- not just the magazine, but the tattoos and the stickers and the totes and the mugs. (No! These ones!) We made all this to celebrate the telling of a story. A story from the heart of parenting.

And as we put our children to bed tonight, as we lie down ourselves under newly-necessary wool comforters (to dream, but perchance, to sleep? Unlikely!) we are full of those jitters that you might feel before the first day of high school. Before a new job. Before the fancy dress ball. In many ways, our booth at Wordstock feels like a great unveiling.

We are bringing our magazine to the ball.

We hope you'll come. If you've backed our magazine at a $10 or higher level, bring a bag to take home your Kickstarter goodies. They'll be mailed out sometime in the next 10 days, but in the meantime, we have them in the flesh, in boxes and bags and hanging from S-hooks on the pipes of our booth structure. If you come to Wordstock, come by, introduce yourself! we'll check you off our list and save your postage.

One of the things we'll be doing in our booth is letting you sit in the submission chair. It's very cozy. And in it you can sit and write flash memoir to submit for our "Relations" issue. Write it freehand, stick it in the jug, we'll publish the best piece and pay you, too. (If you can't make it, or your writing brain doesn't work that way, submit here!)

We wish we could introduce you to all our editors and writers and writers-to-be and writers-we-love who will be there, but our schedules are packed and only Katie and Sarah will be at the booth most every minute. If we could introduce you to everyone here, every minute, this is where we'd start:

• James Bernard Frost, Executive Director of Oregon Writer's Colony, author of a great book on a dwarf preacher who loves Stumptown Coffee. (It's really great! And, kinda, perfectly Portlandic.)
• Wendy Chin-Tanner, our new poetry editor. She's got her own poetry journal, and a book of poems coming out, we love her writing and her verve.
• Megan Stielstra, a new friend of Stealing Time. She's literary director for Second Story, a Chicago group that helps people tell stories. We're kindred spirits from way back who've only just connected.
• Robin Jennings, our non-fiction editor. She has that way, you know? Of seeing the heart of a story? And her own story needs telling, too. You've only heard just the bit.
• Cathi Hanauer, whose Gone is a thriller ("her husband leaves to take the babysitter home and doesn't return"!) and whose Bitch in the House started, sparked, launched Sarah into her storytelling career.
• Kristi Wallace Knight, our fiction editor. She's serious in a way that pierces. She tells a fast-but-serious tale. She's amazing.
• Chelsea Cain. I keep going to Chelsea's readings of murder and mayhem. She says, "I'm not a real writer." Believe me: she's real. She paints families in tragedy and triumph like any magician. If you believe in magic, it's real.
• Rebecca Kelley, whose story, "27 Ways to Wear Your Baby," keep appearing on best-of lists from readers of Stealing Time. She'll be sharing our booth from 2 to 6. Ask her what she's working on.
• Whitney Otto, writer of fiction extraordinaire. We've been wanting to meet her. We're hoping this is the time.
• Brian Doyle. A local author and dad, we keep saying, when we read his work, "oh. Wow!"
• Kerry Cohen. Her memoir about raising her autistic son is uncanny. But we just like the way she smiles.
• Christina Katz. Her work on writing and mothering inspires us; her generous spirit emboldens us.
• Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis. Never mind that we like how the Decemberists sound. What really matters is that this is some of the YA we stay up late at night, to read. More magic, because magic is where we live and what we believe.

There are lots more. Come, we'll give you pretty things and then shoo you off in the direction of someone amazing, or point you toward a great story, or give you a chance to write a piece of flash memoir or let you pick a sticker that shows your #storythief identity. We really want to hear from you. We want to see you. Come! Shake our hand, tell us your story, pick up a magazine, go home with a subscription and all our love.

We are here, rooted in Portland, Oregon, born and bred here, but with a love and a reach for stories that is worldwide, universal.

We wish you were all here, with us. Those of you who are -- who are near enough to make the trip -- are not our primary audience but you are our neighborhood, and we seek to celebrate all the universality with a specific celebration, here, in Southeast Portland, where we belong.

We hope those of you who are our physical neighbors can come. Next Wednesday, September 26, 7-9 p.m. Food, conversation, celebration, words read out loud, words on paper to buy and give away. Here are the details.

Stealing Time magazine 'Genesis' issue launch party
September 26
Wednesday
7 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Xico restaurant (oh! it's so good!)
3715 SE Division, Portland, OR

We are designing this event for adults, but we do love children and understand that your circumstances sometimes demand their attendance. We want you to come, however you can.

Please let us know if you can come, on Facebook, if you do that. We can't wait to show you what we've done and hear your thoughts.

Wow.

This is real: our covers at the printer here in Portland, with my signature on them. Full speed ahead. Covers printed today, and the insides tomorrow, and binding: we could have Volume I, Issue 1: Genesis in our hands by Friday. All of you who have given at the $10 or higher levels will be getting it in your mailbox by the end of next week, assuming no intervening acts of God.

We're assuming we'll be blessed.

When I sat in Katie Proctor's back yard last week in the sun reading the proofs, I was popping out all over in freckles and tears. Steve Almond's piece we're calling "In My Image" is an incredible, true, heart-split-open story about coming to terms with original sin as a parent. Rebecca Kelley's story, "27 Ways to Wear Your Baby" is vulnerable and funny and unhusks the deep-down doubts and fears so many of us have had about loving our children enough. Sharon Trumpy's take on the Garden of Eden is part laugh-out-loud funny, part sly, all relatable. Each and every poem will yank at something inside you; Kristi Wallace Knight and Robin Jennings show masterfully how much of a parenting story you can encapsulate in a few hundred words; Vaughn Teegarden's short play is a visceral examination of the way children open up new parts of us; Melinda Conway's essay on our tenuous hold on our children, our spiritual center, our Eden will have you catching your breath. I just want to read Lisa Hassan Scott's piece, "The Scent of a Field that the Lord Has Blessed," over and over and over, yet again.

There's more, of course. No: there's more, and I can't believe it. I can't believe that our crazy dreams have come true so quickly. I can't believe that we're sending this first issue to 375 Kickstarter backers and subscribers, who have contributed to the cause of telling stories about the heart of parenting, to writing and reading and becoming a community of people who tell and write and read and listen.

Our dream -- well, it was a bit crazy. And our single-minded focus on the magazine has left us a touch behind on the other Kickstarter swag. Mugs, stickers and totes are in process, and we'll be sending them out along with the tattoos and other fun gifts and surprises in the middle of September. 

Expect your mailbox to be full of words this month. Expect your mind to be opened. Expect your heart to be bared. Expect to tell everyone: you were here first, you were part of this beginning, this Genesis.

Profane, heartfelt, spirit-struck, lyrical, peeled back, exposed, elegant, mysterious, inventive, true: we can't wait to give you more of all of it.

When Christopher Onstott took this gorgeous picture of Sarah and Katie, we were talking about organizing the business and filing papers with the State of Oregon and how and when we'll have employees. Seriously: this is how much we love this project and how far your funding is taking us.

A lovely piece by Jennifer Anderson was published in this week's Portland Tribune, and it was glowing in more ways than the sunlight in Katie's backyard. A few details are a little out of tune (we'll be paying our writers from day one while our editors are volunteers -- only for the very, very near term, we hope! -- and I wouldn't quite describe our time after the kids go to bed as "downtime" so much as "time without kids, mostly") but the melody is just the way we want it; one of "celebrating the daily triumphs and struggles" of family life, "finding the art of parenting."

Meanwhile, we have gone to press ourselves. Yesterday morning the printer knocked on Sarah's door with a proof copy of what you, yourselves, will see in about two weeks -- two weeks! -- the preview issue of 'Genesis.' While we were filling out paperwork, we were also making editorial calendars, and playing peek-a-boo, and looking at submissions for the full issue, and negotiating coffee shop sword fights, and ordering business cards, and eating the strawberries first tasted by Katie's toddlers. They were delicious. 

This is all delicious. A mad rush of beauty and delight. We can't wait to share it with you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. We spent two weeks modeling poor control of our screen time habits, watching the numbers tick ever higher, at first slowish and then very fast and suddenly, on the night of July 1, all zoomy and the inducement for many happy cries around Portland and in the living rooms of the people who care about us around the world.

Thanks to you we raised $9,555.22 of belief in words from 216 wonderful people. This will mean many beautiful pages of literary magazine now and in the future. For you to do: if you have backed us, run around the house dancing, as we did. We can only suggest "I'm So Excited" by the Pointer Sisters. If you have submitted, expect a message from us soon. If you want to submit in the future, see us.

And we have met with our list of beautiful submissions and we have selected most of those that will go into the magazine. We're thrilled to have found a few new writers, people whose names you may have never heard, but whose talents were wading-pool-clear to us when we opened their pieces. However, we do not have quite as much as we would like.

So we have decided to offer, instead of a full magazine, a sneak peak into the magazine-to-be when we have a little more time to develop pieces. A little more time to wheedle a beautiful writer or two to lend his or her words to our fancy, big magazine.

We'll print a 24-page preview "Genesis" magazine around August 1. We're calling it Issue 0.8, because it's almost there. We're re-opening submissions until July 22 to give those who've just learned of us a little more time to develop into our cornerstone writers for the years to come. We'll send the preview issue to our Kickstarter contributors, and then in September we'll publish the full 1.0, the issue we have had in our stress dreams (anyway) and the ones we have skimming through our minds as we ride down hills on our bikes and chase through summer lawns after our children.

The subscribers who discover us later will get only the September Issue 1; Kickstarter contributors and early subscribers get both. So, subscribe, now, and a few of you will get further bonuses. Because you all make us so happy, a few early subscribers (via Paypal or check or handing us a $20 bill and your address when you see us on the street), selected at random, will receive special parent-writer mugs that we're making for our Kickstarter contributors.

This is a tell-all: we're telling everyone and we want you to, as well. This issue is going to be incredible and you're going to be so glad you were there from the start.