Sep 7, 2015 | announcement

Issue 27 — From the Editor

by Brian J. White

Welcome to the final issue of Year 3! This month, we wrap up Lilith Saintcrow’s serial She Wolf and Cub. We have a terrific short story by Sofia Samatar, The Closest Thing to Animals, which takes us inside a quarantined city and a search for art and friendship. There’s Keffy R. M. Kehrli’s Singing Wings, exploring how extreme change affects relationships, and John Wiswell’s Bones at the Door, which you probably shouldn’t read before bed.

We also have an excerpt of our upcoming urban fantasy novel Take On Me by Minerva Zimmerman! It’s out Oct. 6.

Thanks so much to everyone who helped make Year 3 possible. We kick off Year 4 next month. The magazine is going to be a little smaller for a while, till we get the funding higher. Please take a look at our Patreon if you’re not already a backer. If you are and you’re enjoying Fireside, please keep telling your friends about us.

This has been an amazing ride so far. Thank you. We love you all.

© 2015 Brian J. White

About the author

Brian started Fireside Fiction Company in 2012 as an experiment in crowdfunding and paying speculative fiction writers well above the accepted professional rate at the time. It worked! Thanks, have a great day!

Brian has been informed he has to write more in his bio. Fine! Brian took that experiment through five Kickstarters (and did not die!) and into a subscription model. During his tenure, Fireside published 150 stories, five novels, and one novella, and also published the first #BlackSpecFic report, which examined the massive under-representation of Black short-story writers in the field, prompting conversation, reflection, and change in the speculative fiction community. It remains one of the most important things he has worked on in his adult life. Brian was a 2017 World Fantasy Award finalist in the Special Award, Non-Professional category for Fireside, and Fireside has been nominated for multiple Hugo Awards.

Facing the burnout that is all too common among people who work at small presses, Brian stepped down as editor and publisher in 2017 to regroup and recharge mentally. He returned as interim editorial director in 2020 and resumed full ownership of the company in June 2021 with a great team you can read about below.

In the wider world, Brian is a former journalist who worked as an editor at The Courier-Journal in Louisville from 2006–2010 and at the Boston Globe from 2010–2018, where he was part of the staff that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting in 2014 for the newspaper’s coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2014. He still lives around Boston, where he works as an editor for a private company and takes photographs, paints miniatures, and spends time with his amazing wife and various cats.