ANNOUNCING: Big Score Lit, a new Brooklyn-based zine of prose, poetry, and criticism
(Don't make it political)
In the New York City Democratic mayoral primary that just wrapped up with a resounding first-round knockout, wealthy donors (read: billionaires) neurotic enough to fear the mayoralty of State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani spent upwards of 25 million dollars on ineffectual Super PAC messaging. Talk about waste.
I am not writing here about political strategy, or having served as a field captain for the Working Families Party (which endorsed a slate of candidates, incl. Mamdani and Brad Lander), but just as a matter of perspective when it comes to what it takes to run a literary publication — and the leisure time and space necessary to read. Big Score, the new lit zine I am launching with a slate of talented writers and editors, runs on a donor-fueled 10k a year. Meaning a single donation of 100k would let us do what we do for a decade; of one million, for several, plus wonder of wonders, we could actually pay ourselves; of 25 million… look, you get the idea and yeah, it’s kinda obscene. We live inside a broken system, where billionaires assign dollars to absolutely frivolous (even corrupt) ends, while innumerable worthy, culture-based endeavors starve for want of support, one more glaring symptom, for those paying attention, of how sick our corporatized politics have become.
At the mid-20th century height of mass literary culture, the era that minted innumerable novels foundational to the American canon, more people read because of the widespread affluence that afforded more people such time and space. (Were there discriminatory walls that targeted certain peoples from participating in that widespread affluence? Oh you bet.) That era is long gone, decidedly for better… and for worse, in the sense that so many of our civic institutions are presently beleaguered to the point of near-oblivion. Participation in civic culture is premised on a literate populace, and a literate populace is founded on the ability to hold and sort and deconstruct and reimagine narratives of every kind, within the surround-sound projection domes of our own solitary heads.
You may have heard: Nobody reads anymore! But you may have also heard: AI is coming for everybody’s jobs, the coders first. All of a sudden, those graduating STEM majors find themselves in a void — and guess what…? Those who’ve dedicated their lives to writing and narrative are here to say, Welcome, Brothers and Sisters! Whether you know it or not, Big Score is for you, the 1s, the 0s, everything in between.
When I graduated from a small liberal arts college in 2001, English was the most popular major; within another five years that focus had started its long slide into perceived irrelevance, as our newly anointed Move-Fast-and-Break-Things kings decreed that the time of gatekeepers (excepting themselves, of course) had ended.
Well, now. Is it possible?… do we think it’s possible?… that things could ever… could they ever… swing back the other way?
Big Score, meanwhile, has the mildest, least offensive of ambitions: to provide two print issues per year of contemporary excellence in writing: prose, poetry, and criticism. We will pay our writers. We will read all of our submissions with the writers’ identities removed, allowing the work to sing for its supper, and make our choices on that basis. We will throw a couple of parties. We hope that, in whatever capacity (whether author, reader, cheerleader, supporter, or some beautiful, category-busting blend of the aforementioned) you will join us in that endeavor. That calling? Look, it’s just what we do.
Check out our presently bare-bones website here.
Subscribe here.
Writers… we open for submissions on July 5th. More here.
Scope our masthead.
Tell your friends. Tell your students. Go to the rooftops like Leonard Michaels, and shout about it. As a favor to us. But also for yourself.
