On the end of a journal I loved

Photo by James Lee on Unsplash.

Woke up this morning to the news that Drunk Monkeys is closing its doors. To be fair, I had a bit of a heads from a friend on the staff who let me know it was coming.

That foreknowledge actually made the news a little sadder.

Most journals I admire, well, I do that admiring from the outside. From the distance of a reader. Through the mediation of Submittable or Duotrope or New Pages or Chill Subs…

But this was not the case at DM. I was first introduced to the space by my former student, now friend, Sean. He had recently moved onto the masthead as a section editor during his time in Orange County.

From there, he connected me with co-founder Matt, a guy I’ve come to like a great deal. I did an episode of his podcast and then, after seeing what DM put out, submitted an essay I cared deeply about.

When they said yes, I was ecstatic. At the time, “Subsidence” (read it here) was a foray into what has become a series of pieces I’m closing in on having a book’s-worth of. And if I’m honest, I wasn’t sure I could pull off the form I was wrestling with.

So, when Kolleen and the crew chose to publish it, a switch flipped and I pushed into the rest of the ideas I had bouncing around in my head. In fact, there’s a direct line from “Subsidence” to “Signal to Noise Ratio,” my most well-received essay to date.

After that essay, Sean or Kolleen would reach out from time to time and ask if I had anything for their pop culture series, “One Perfect Episode” and “It’s Good, Actually.” The nerd in me said yes, and then actually wrote what I said I had. CHiPs, Psych, and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air got the one perfect treatment and I made a case for the movie Sunset Park being better than the sum of its parts.

It’s the rare journal that allows for this balance of serious and strange, of pop and art. Creating this kind of space is a credit to the people who ran DM all these years. And those people are a primary reason I encouraged my students to consider applying to intern there. Publishing, as a broader industry, is so often simply a profit-first endeavor, it makes internalizing the core ethos of relationships and risk critical for those entering the business.

In short, I knew who I was working with at DM and that mattered. Deeply.

So there is sadness in the end of Drunk Monkeys, but also real appreciation on my part, as there should be. Creating a home for a wide swath of voices and fostering them all is the most critical work the literary community should be doing. Drunk Monkeys did just that.