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History of the mag

It started out out on the road in 1979, as just a seed planted by the one and only Holden Caulfield that turned into an epistolary experiment in communication between writers whose work I admired but didn’t personally know at that point.

With roots in the Everglades, the Florida Keys and the Georgia Sea Islands, snail mail was sent from different points along the road like real smoke signals used be sent from one butte to the next by various tribes intent on stopping the unstoppable encroachment of (what the white man called) “progress” from making them obsolete.
By the time the caravan reached Memphis the following year the letters had turned into(for lack of a better phrase) a (pre-blog) news letter, with communications from all who responded passed on to all the participants.
By the time we left Memphis in the spring of 1980 the first two issues of Smoke Signals as a mag had come out.

Three others were hatched along the road, from the vicinities of Banner Elk, North Carolina, College Hill, Ohio, and Candlewood Lake, Connecticut, but never materialized as anything more than master copies, because movement into the great unknown occurred each time a different issue was ready to come out, without a clear cut destination on the horizon to field the feedback from, until we landed in the heart of the pre-renaissance old country known as Brooklyn.

Five more (bigger, more evolved) issues (The Hanging Loose issue, The Unbraining issue, The Jam issue, The Over The Line issue and The Book Fair issue) featuring, among others, Jim Harrison, Charles Bukowski, Andrei Codrescu, R. Crumb, N. Mississippi All Star Luther Dickinson, Rudy Wurlitzer, Ken Kesey, Iris Owens, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, Reverend Ivan Stang, Robert Frank, Terry Southern, Raymond Mungo, Ron Sukenick, Hal Sirowitz, Mikhail Horowitz, Barney Rosset, Seymour Krim, Al Aronowitz, Michael Lally, Raymond Mungo, Patti Smith, Maurice Girodias (http://www.instantclassics.com/ic_html/next_man.html), Robert Anton Wilson, Maureen Owen, Prof Irwin Corey, Richard Hambleton, Robert Smithson, Raymond Federman, d.a. levy, Lord Buckley and the long lost Mike Wallace interview with Jack Kerouac,came out as a literary quarterly from the Kensington-Ditmus Park heart of that “old country”, between 1981 and 1984, prompting the quip on the intent to come out four times a year to be changed by the time Flatbush was a just a memory in the rear view mirror to a literary quarterly that promised to come out “once every four years”.

And now after four unpublished issues that were supposed to come out in the 1990s (but for various reasons, didn’t), we’re back, with the intent of fulfilling the promise of being a literary quarterly again, by making all that material you never had a chance to envelope and drown yourself in finally available On Line, lacing in hordes of very old and very new fiction, essays, reviews, rants, interviews, recommendations, poetry, commix, photos, drawings, hidden agendas, fan mail and death threats at least four times a year.

Publisher/
Editor-in-Chief.........................................................Mike Golden
Book Review Editor...............................................C. B. Coble