This is Megaera's first issue. Certain questions are inevitably raised. What are we doing that no other literary e-zine out there is doing? With over five hundred literary e-zines on the net, why do we need another one? What sets Megaera apart? Rightly asked questions. What sets us apart certaintly isn't the fact that we took our name from Roman mythology. It isn't our inclusion of poetry, art, and fiction. So just what is it?

Perhaps I should start with an easy answer. How did Megaera get started? Originally, our idea was to include only Salt Lake City area writers and publish the magazine in print as a free weekly people could pick up at the local book store or coffee house. That idea bombed when we recieved a total of zero submissions. It was kind of hard for us to believe that nobody wanted to submit, but then again, there were other problems. We didn't get the word out to a wide enough audience, we didn't want to even think of dealing with the legal aspects of it, and we didn't know how to go about getting advertisers to sponser us.

The point of relating our past failure? None, really. But it just goes to show the internet should have been our first choice. We reach a larger audience. We don't have to think too much about the legal aspects. And perhaps most important of all, we don't need advertisers to give us money, due to the many free webspace hosting services out there.

To return to the questions raised in the first paragraph, the reason we started this journal was because we didn't find any really experimental e-zines out there (of course, just because we can't find them doesn't mean they don't exist). Through the three hundred e-zines I personally skimmed through, I didn't find one 2^nd person story, not one poem that experimented drastically with its grammar, not one art peice that really stood out as being radical. Writers in general seemed to avoid using any tense other than past. Print journals I've read tend to avoid more experimental writing as well, but not as totally as I found e-zines do. It seemed to me, writers were avoiding stretching themselves out. I suspected the cause was the editors. Maybe they refused to publish anything not already established. I wanted to read a zine with experimental writing, and since I couldn't find one, I decided to start one in which the experimental was encouraged.

How did we do? Well, we didn't find the next Gertrude Stein or e. e. cummings. But nevertheless, we did much better than we'd hoped. In fact, we were pleased with every submission we recieved. In the area of poetry, Travis Ray Cole shows some experimentation with grammer and his repetition of key words holds the poems together throughout his stream of consciousness ramblings. Bess Kemp makes each word mean something in her minimalist poetry. Her restraint and delicacy with language leave many images to haunt your mind. David Sutherland is our Megaera Award winner for poetry. His descriptions of nature are stunning and disturbing. Images of child birth stay with you long after you've read the poem. Sisters Carolyn Zeibig and Jana Zeibig display two very distinct styles of writing, both concerned with a woman's place in society, among other things.

On the fiction front, Robert Hanshaw leads with a defamiliarizing story of love and dissatisfaction with religion. Terry McCammon relates a horrifying tale of a person discovering something about himself (not recommended for our sensitive readers). Tom O'Brien tells a humorous antecdote of a proud taxi driver and his unusual fare. And Rowan Wolf offers a short tale of philosophy in every day life, which earns him The Megaera Award for short fiction. Our sole art submission, consisting of some well-rendered fractals, comes from Alice Kelley.

We hope you're as excited about this first issue as we are. Oh yes, some of you may be wondering what the deal is with naming our magazine after one of the nasty Furies. Well, Megaera, from a book I can no longer find, is said to mean "Dark Memory". The relation of this to art is almost too obvious to point out: art often deals with memory and its changing relationship to perception. As for "Dark", well, we didn't want this magazine to focus too much on sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows, and our submittors have obliged us for the most part.

May the next issue be as good as this one,
Darrell Moore