This week, I’m off visiting Tina Pollick as a guest on her blog for a three-part interview series about Spark: A Creative Anthology. Be sure to read the whole “Interview with editor Brian Lewis” at tinapollick.com!

Here’s a quick excerpt.

Tina Pollick: Are there any publications or publishers that you admire?

Brian Lewis: Without hesitation, I’d say Stupefying Stories from Rampant Loon Press, edited by Bruce Bethke. There are handful of living writers who can say they’ve influenced writing or culture; I can’t think of any, besides Bruce, who have had such an influence on writing and culture that not only did the term they coined become part of our lexicon, but the whole concept became completely detached from and disassociated with the original writer. The term? Cyberpunk.

Now, with Stupefying Stories, Bruce Bethke is mapping the future of publishing through this direct-to-eBook monthly anthology, foregoing the expensive and inefficient traditional publishing model in favor of what is, in his view, the best way to distribute new fiction.

I’m also somewhat enamored with Unstuck and Shadow Road Quarterly. Unstuck is a “kindred spirit” publication in that they actively seek to publish emerging authors alongside established professionals; the cross-genre focus of their annual print & eBook release is “literary fiction with elements of the fantastic, the futuristic, or the surreal.” Similarly, Shadow Road Quarterly seeks literature without genre boundaries, is an online anthology accepting “writing that has, at its heart, characters that speak to us or experiences that echo through our minds even after the piece is finished.”

Shadow Road Quarterly is where I found To The River by George Wells, which I quickly solicited for reprint inSpark: A Creative Anthology, Volume III.

These three publications in particular, though there are several more, are important to me because they prove that there is still an interest in and demand for great short literature—and that there are still writers producing it.

Read more at tinapollick.com …

Continue to Part 2: Ask the Writers

Continue to Part 3: Responses to Reader Questions