Feb 7, 2016 | announcement

Issue 30 — From the Editor

by Brian J. White

Welcome to Issue 30. We’ve had a great month at Fireside, reaching our Year 4 survival goal with time to spare! Thank you so much to everyone. There’s still time to spread the word as we work to hit our stretch goals by Feb. 5 to add more words to each issue and to hire Daniel José Older as a guest editor.

On to the stories!

We open with a really tough but important one: When He First Laid Eyes by Rachael K. Jones. It’s about stalking and harassment of women, and it’s powerful. Next is Effie Seiberg’s Re: Little Miss Apocalypse Playset, a fun romp through a corporate email chain. And we close with Fairy Tales are for White People by Melissa Yuan-Innes, which takes us inside Guangdong Barbecue in Toronto, where a debt has come due.

Thanks for reading, and as always, for supporting Fireside!

© 2016 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.