New Southern California Literary Journal, Air/Light, Rolls Out Issue One

Announcing Air/Light, a new journal published quarterly in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California (and in conjunction with Kenyon Review)! Edited by former LA Times book editor and critic, David Ulin, the first issue's bevy of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry will be rolling out through the fall: "The aim is to blend, or blur … the cohesion of the quarterly with the fluidity of the digital."

Issue one's first offerings include three poems by Lynne Thompson, an essay that centers Virginia Woolf by USC professor Emily Hodgson Anderson, nonfiction in fragments by Vickie Vértiz, fiction by Lilliam Rivera, and lessons from California by Susan Straight. Content is to come from the likes of Wendy C. Ortiz, Victoria Chang, Lynn Melnick, and Douglas Kearney. "Most of all, you’ll find voices that matter, that are insistent, that say what needs to be said. Think of the journal, then, as a chorus," says Ulin. 

Los Angeles Daily News spoke to the editor about the project, its focus on Southern California, and the origins of the name:

In [a] 1998 New Yorker essay, Lawrence Weschler talked to a California Institute of Technology scientist about the phenomenon and learned it’s the result of ever-shifting particles in our air, something the experts call “airlight.”

“Depending on how those particles are positioned, they either clarify the light by allowing it to pass over them, or if they’re in a different position, they can actually block or reflect or refract the light, and then they really obscure what you’re seeing,” Ulin says.

“So sometimes you can see something really clearly and then another moment you’ll see it in a very diffuse way.”

It’s a quality that struck Ulin as an apt metaphor for much of Southern California, so he suggested it when he and his colleagues in the English Department working on the journal started looking for a name.

“We all kind of batted it around and decided that it actually did sort of fit the mission of what we were trying to do,” he says. “Both in terms of, let’s say, blurriness, a form we’re talking about right now in the balance between traditional and experimental, and also in terms of the kind of work that we’re looking for, which is work that kind of creates its own form, its own definition, it’s own boundaries.…

Enjoy the phenomena at Air/Light! We look forward to what's to come (including this reading with Holly Melgard and Nick Thurston on Sunday).