What Makes Something Pinchy?
By Moriah Mcstay, Managing Editor
Memphis is a weird place. The giant pyramid in our skyline houses a lodge-themed Bass ProShop. A herd of buffalo lives in one of our city parks. We've got our very own prince--a self-proclaimed alien from the planet of Zambovia---who claims to be 333 years old and runs for Mayor every election cycle.
We are a city woven through with strange combinations. Memphis is peanut butter and bananas, grit and grind. We are organic farmer's markets and hole-in-the-wall barbeque joints; Stax records and opera. Back in the Eighties, when Saturday morning wrestling was the biggest thing on TV here, Andy Kaufmann from Taxi trash-talked our beloved wrestling celebrity on Late Night with David Letterman, and the city was rabid with indignation.
We also have Pandas in our zoo.
The Pinch is a product of this off-kilter city. We like stories and poems that knit together the unexpected, that are as weird and complex as Memphis. We strive to publish pieces that offer a new way to look that thing we've stopped seeing, because it's in our line of vision all the time. When we go through our submission queue, we're looking for beauty, tragedy, laughter, all of it, just upside down. We like things that get us arguing at the weekly staff meeting, because amazing art happens in the space where we don't agree.
We don't really care about a writer's publishing credits. In fact, The Pinch has a history of launching emerging writers. We published names likes Roxane Gay, Robert Penn Warren, and Margaret Atwood before everyone else heard of them. Nothing makes us happier than to tell others, years after publishing a story, that we recognized a writer's genius--their pinchy-ness--first.
So we look forward to reading those incoming lodge-themed pyramid of non-fiction, the wrestling ekphrastics and Zambovian epistolaries. Whatever strange idea is in your head, craft it well, edit and revise, get it beautiful and sideways, and let us take a look.
It could be just the Pinchy thing we're looking for.
