Ian Doherty, a creative writing student at Susquehanna University, recently conducted this Q&A with me for one of his classes. We briefly discuss the origins of [PANK], the state of the magazine, and a few things in between.

Doherty: How did [PANK] start?

Seigel: In 2005, I got a job teaching creative writing at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, MI. In 2006, there was $300 in a fund dedicated to a then defunct in-house student litmag. The chair handed it to me and said, essentially, use it or lose it, no strings attached. I scraped together an additional $3500 from the chair and my dean, found an undergrad assistant, and started the magazine. The student named it. I invited friends and colleagues from my MFA days to submit. And I handed out copies of the first issue for free at the 2007AWP in Atlanta. We put up a website that year that just had submission guidelines on it. We managed a second print issue in 2008, the same year Roxane Gay came on board. We launched the online magazine that same year. 2008 was, in many ways, the year things really got started. That’s the nutshell, anyway.

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Paper Darts, one of my personal favorites, had a couple nice pictures of our AWP book fair table and some nice things to say about us on their blog.

“It’s no surprise that PANK has one of the sexiest displays at the bookfair. Their table is overflowing with their bold and finely designed merch—the trick is fighting through the throng of PANK lovers to get close enough to reverently touch it all.” -Paper Darts

*****

If you see [PANK] out and about, snap a photo and send it to editor@pankmagazine.com.

City Lights magazine rack, San Francisco, CA

Not sure why seeing this still makes me as happy as it does, but it does.

1. PANK 5 will assemble an army. PANK 5 will give birth to a dancing star. Poetry, prose and ecstatic otherness from  Deb  Olin Unferth, Lucas Southworth, Emily Kiernan, xTx, Sheldon Lee Compton, Kaitlin Dyer, S.J. Fowler, Marcus Wicker, Christopher Phelps, J.A. Tyler, Michelle Dove, Lindsey Drager, Jamie Iredell, Rob Roensch, Eugenia Tsutsumi, Tim Tomlinson, Brian Oliu, M.E. Griffith, Clark Knowles, Phil Estes, Laura McCullough, Lauren Foss Goodman, Neal Peters, Colleen O’ Connor, Nickolas Butler, Luca Dipierro, Matthew McBrearty, Chelsea Laine Wells, Donna Vitucci, Jim Daniels, Troy Urquhart, Jessica Berger, Ori Fienberg, Toshiya Kamei, Rion Scott, Mark Baumer, Jonathan Callahan, Josh Kleinberg, Melissa Broder, Traci O’ Connor, Nick Ripatrazone, Arlene Ang, Tasha Matsumoto, Gabriel Welsch, Mindy Hung, Mabel Yu, Kathleen Heil, Nancy Carol Moody, Eileen D. Escabar, Janey Smith, Andrea Kneeland, Emilie Lindemann, Kuzhali Manickavel, Teresa Milbrodt, Valerie Suffron, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdao, Amber Sparks, Lydia Ship, Rachel Yoder, Christina Frigo, Megan Falley, Alexis Orgera, Elizabeth Hildreth, P.F. Potvin, Elizabeth Hildreth, Brian Russell, A. Papatya Bucak, Todd McKie, Christina Murphy, Elizabeth Wade, Kyle Minor, Mark Neely, Ben Jahn, Andrew Farkas, Liana Jahan Imam, Lauren Becker and Lauren Wheeler. Pre-order yours today.

2.  Matt Salesses’  Our Island of Epidemics is now available for order  here and they are going, going fast. These fourteen tiny tales recount the story of a community of island dwellers who catch their island’s strange and fleeting epidemics—memory loss, unrequited love, magic, extrasensitive hearing, talking to animals, dissociation—and the relationship that the people of the island have with their home, with each other and with the diseases. That is, until one man becomes immune.

“One of the great feats of fiction is to create a world where anything can happen. Matthew Salesses has done this with  Our Island of Epidemics and, in doing so, he has revealed the great difficulty of the human condition.”  —Michael Kimball, author of  Dear Everybody

Contract some Salesses live,  11/7 at Abe’s Bar in Providence, RI (Cousins Reading Series).

3. We’ve come upon an unexpected stash of PANK1. For a limited time, order any  $10 worth of PANK at the PANK store and we’ll throw in a free copy of PANK1 until they’re gone.

Get thee to the PANK STORE today!

Actually, I still don’t think P&W knows we exist. Otherwise we would have had a cover by now, no? Regardless, on page 82 of the new Nov/Dec issue, in an article titled “The Journals Agents Are Reading,” Diana Finch of Diana Finch Literary Agency name-drops us in a roundabout way. That’s it, really, but still, desperate egos call for desperate validation, and this is the first time that PANK’s name has appeared in a P&W article. So we got that going for us on this lovely Monday.

Actually, I still don’t think P&W knows we exist. Otherwise we would have had a cover by now, no? Regardless, on page 82 of the new Nov/Dec issue, in an article titled “The Journals Agents Are Reading,” Diana Finch of Diana Finch Literary Agency name-drops us in a roundabout way. That’s it, really, but still, desperate egos call for desperate validation, and this is the first time that PANK’s name has appeared in a P&W article. So we got that going for us on this lovely Monday.