Midnight Breakfast

Issue 8

Issue 8

Letter from the Editor

by Rebecca Rubenstein

Hello,

Almost a year ago to the day, after two sleepless nights and a verifiably insane amount of editing, design tweaks, and other staples of online publishing, we launched our first issue of the magazine out into the world. If you’ve been following along since that epic day, I wish I could clap you on the shoulder and squeeze. I wish I could shake your hand and then hug you and then high-five you and then find the words to express my gratitude for the fact that you’ve stuck with us, that you’ve kept reading, that you are still here. Anyone can tell you a magazine is nothing without the various individuals behind it—its editors, its designers, its writers, its artists—but it is also nothing without its readers. Without readers, there is no community, and I don’t much like to think about living in a world, online and off, where community is absent.

Over the past year, we’ve cultivated the most beautiful community. Not just with the writers and artists we’ve been so fortunate to work with, but with everyone who has, at one point or another, sat down with one of our pieces. There’s a saying I love: praise where praise is due. Whether you’ve been with us for the long haul or are just happening upon us now, I’d like to praise you for supporting a tiny publication like ours, and small publications in general. Especially when there is so much out there to read. Thank you for taking the time. Every literary magazine editor I know is filled with unequivocal joy whenever the work they’ve brought to light reaches and touches someone. Thank you for showing us we matter—that all of this matters.

Issue Eight holds firmly in my heart because it circles back to something that distinguished Issue One, and has always gripped me in writing: place. From a jazz-infused church in Maryland to an impossible parking situation in San Francisco, from the journey of a man’s entire life to the body of an imagined cake, from a decomposing apartment to the inevitable zombie apocalypse, the personal, private, and physical all morph these pieces into things of wonder. I hope you enjoy what you find, and again: thank you for riding along with us on this strange and effusive journey.

Rebecca Rubenstein
Editor-in-Chief

Special thanks to our Patreon patrons for helping make this issue possible: and our anonymous patrons.

Issue 8