A Letter From the Editors
It’s March, 2020 and I’m standing by the vegetables, at a supermarket on Broadway. Shelves are somewhat bare, especially in the toilet paper and bread aisles. Someone coughs a few aisles over and I decide that I don’t need whatever else I was supposed to pick up. I make my way to the long checkout line, where a man scolds me for keeping my wallet in my back pocket — this is New York. Damned fool. It’s the last time I’ll visit a supermarket in nearly a year. Classes at Columbia’s MFA are cancelled that evening, and then for a week. They resume virtually the following Monday; We never set foot in Dodge Hall again.
In that fairytale week of limbo, the founding editors joke around — wouldn’t it be funny to start a magazine called Quaranzine? Do you get it? We’re oh so clever, until we find a dozen or so other very clever people who’ve jumped on the same idea. Bummer. But we’ve discussed the idea with friends, peers at Columbia, who still have an itch to contribute work in their newfound free time. And why not? We can’t sit around playing Animal Crossing while sirens blare down Broadway every few minutes. I mean, we can, but it doesn’t feel great.
In the one-bedroom apartment — bathroom through the bedroom — we dream of names for a personal project, a lit journal. No Contact feels right, or rather, it doesn’t feel like anything, which feels especially right for the time. We approach an artist friend for issue-cover ideas, and she jokingly suggests the Ben Affleck meme, smoking a cigarette below the mask banded around his eyes. We laugh. What if? And then, seriously, what if? It just makes sense. Let’s pull the facemask over our eyes, let’s smoke and ruin our health, our future, if it isn’t ruined already.
We start with an issue every two weeks, devouring the midnight oil. All-nighters become expected. What time is it? They’re cheering outside, it’s evening, the underpaid healthcare workers shift-changing. We switch to monthly issues. They’re cheering outside, it’s noon, and Biden will be president. We don’t want to stop. A two-week quarantine, a month quarantine, a half-year quarantine. Did quarantine ever end? Did it ever really, truly happen in the first place?
No Contact has come a long, long way from the socially-distanced couch.
We used to brag about where else our contributors have been published, until it became a roll-call of all the journals we could think of. It’s a nice problem to have. Our contributors one-up us and publish collections, chap-books, bound volumes where “first appeared in No Contact” has been printed for eternal posterity. We collect Best Microfiction awards, two of them, and a Best Small Fictions to boot. We joke on Twitter with lit mags we dreamed of being published in. We put out a call for help, and are subsequently staggered by the quality of staff we bring on, who are eager to offer their incredible assistance under the No Contact name. Ben Affleck, meanwhile, struggles to hold his tower of Dunkin Donuts bags, coffees, and we’re putting out double-digit issues. Can you believe it? How did this happen?
We’re so humbled to offer Issue Twenty on the one-year anniversary of No Contact’s inception. We’re proud of this issue, even though we’re proud of every issue. To us, it’s the perfect microcosm of everything we’ve published in the last year. Award-winning contributors, emerging writers. Fables, mind-bending prose, work that grapples with our common pressures — family, memory, the world outside. Exquisite poetry, buzzing with layers upon layers of rich meaning. Nonfiction that tells us we’re not alone. Everything is still out there. And, as always, some of it is even in Adrian, Michigan.
We hope you enjoy, and that you’ve enjoyed the past year at No Contact. Don’t miss our staff recommendations at the bottom, some of our favorite pieces we’ve had the pleasure to publish. And keep on keeping on — we’ll be here. At a careful distance.
Until next year, friends.
- Elliot Alpern and Gauraa Shekhar
The Editors
No Contact
