A New Sheriff in Town

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Tuesday, May 23, 2006
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One of my regrets after the Calvin Festival was not having had the opportunity to chat more with Kimberly Culbertson, editor of the new quarterly Relief Journal, scheduled to debut in November. My friend Karen Miedrich-Luo is the very capable creative non-fiction editor at Relief, so I was anxious to find out more about the journal's plans. There aren't many reputable print journals that publish Christian fiction. Image is the flagship and Rock and Sling is off to a great start, but the long-awaited Ankeny Briefcase hasn't made it to newsstands yet and Mars Hill Review has stopped publishing. So the prospect of a new, high-quality print journal is rather thrilling.

Since Calvin, I've had the chance to talk more with Kimberly and I think Relief Journal is heading in a promising direction, so much so that I have accepted her invitation to join the staff as Fiction Editor. I haven't worked on a literary magazine for over a decade, so I may be a little rusty. Hopefully it will all come back to me, though.

What will I be looking for as an editor? Here's my line: "Mark thinks faith should produce robust, engaged writing. As an editor, he's looking for well-crafted prose that stands up to a second reading, stories that are rich and layered." In essence, I hope to see thoughtful, rattling stories that take their craft as seriously as their ideas. Everybody says it, but in this case it's true: I want good stories told well, and nothing else matters.

So wish me well in this new endeavor, and if you're a writer looking to knock my socks off, visit the Relief site and submit your work. We're a print journal, but we accept online submissions, which makes the whole process quick and painless. Come November, we hope to have an excellent debut issue to wow you with.