Whitney Pastorek's Keen Eye

As you may know, the print incarnation of the small magazine Pindeldyboz died a quiet death this month, with the announcement by Editor in Chief Whitney Pastorek that the upcoming issue (No. 7) will be the last. Issue Seven will be released as a PDF before the end of the year. The website will keep going.

Check out the Hobart website for a short tribute to Whitney and Pindeldyboz, an essay entitled: A Short Essay in Which We Celebrate Whitney Pastorek's Keen Eye for Beautiful Things. Also, as my last act as Hobart web photo editor I used photos from Whitney's Flickr page (with her permission, of course) to illustrate's this month's Hobart stories. You can see Whitney's photos by jumping around this month's links on the Hobart page.

A few months ago I saw Jim Shepard saying in an interview that literary communities are ephemeral, and that's true. My writing friends and I seem to be linked by MySpace or Facebook pages, by the e-mails we send each other, by the brief times we cross path at readings, workshops, or conferences. What was the point of this paragraph? Just that, for many of us, the Pindeldyboz print issue was a familiar waypoint on the journey. We'll miss seeing it on the magazine stand, holding it in our hands, and reading its ecclectic mix of wonderful stories.