I would like to explain a bit of the background of this issue.

I’ve wanted for us to put together an issue like this for a while. Few publications will handle excerpts, and I've felt they ought to have a chance.

Our first attempt was unsuccessful. Excerpts are difficult animals. When they venture into our garden they rarely play well with the other animals. Their eyes wander, eager for some rarity to meditate upon: a misfitting vegetable . . . a vine that climbs the wrong thing in the wrong way . . . some breachy primrose or creeping woodsorrel that will soon start hugging everyone and being loud and ruining everything but, hey, today it’s sort of cute.

In short, with so much distraction, it’s hard to get to know these excerpts!

After a while we gave up (and extracted the weeds). We forgot about excerpts.

Yet, still I wanted excerpt-animals. One day I fell to thinking about them, and the problem and solution became obvious. In the long-form’s land-of-plenty, license is generous. Our garden does not lend itself to this. Therefore we had to take away their license, by imposing a constraint.

Our constraint was space, tight enough to be felt. 300 words, in the end, felt too fair. The constraint needed to force the author to consider every element of the work, the bold and the shy, the controlled gestures and the peepers with secrets.

So we agreed on 200 words. We would see how writers responded to this! Thankfully, artists can’t help themselves, they want to see what happens . . . and they delivered.