It's a question I've been asked often: "Why Pif?" In the beginning, I always assumed I was being asked about the name itself. It's an odd name, assuredly. One that just popped into being one fateful day as I was reading through a handful of email submissions for the as-yet-to-be-named journal I had decided to launch. A nonsense, made-up word that could be an acronym for what has, over the years, become our core content: Poetry, Interviews, Fiction. As time passed, however, I came to realize that the vast majority of inquiries were really "Why did you start Pif Magazine?" The answer to that question is a little more difficult to answer.

I first went "online" sometime in the summer of 1993. Most of my time then was spent downloading games, screensavers, and various whatnot from local bulletin boards, or occasionally venturing out onto obscure threads of the World-Wide Web with a wonderfully difficult-to-navigate utility known as WORM. Those of you who remember the glory days of Pine, Gopher and Finger with fondness, this flashback will undoubtedly bring a tear of nostalgia to your eye. For those of you who don't, suffice it to say that the Net at that time was a tangled mess of text threads that led anywhere and everywhere — and seldom in a logical way. At the time I remember thinking that the idea of the Internet was striking — the world virtually at your fingertips — though the implementation was not very practical. All that was to change one day when my wife downloaded a copy of Mosaic from the NCSA site.

Suddenly there were pictures. And formatting.

I had been writing sporadically over the years, sending out submissions whenever the muse struck, combing through the pages of The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses for new markets, receiving a smattering of interest and enough rejection notes to fill a footlocker. It seemed that wherever I turned, whichever literary journal I graced with my submission, I ran into the writing profession's formidable Catch-22. Traditional print journals published work by published writers. How to break-in? How to become published? Print journals were (and still are, in many respects) porthole windows into the grand and forbidding castle of academia. Journals published writing students, alumni, professors — people who had taken up residence within the walls. The ivory towers gleamed brightly, invitingly, but also as a warning beacon. Literary journals seemed to be an exclusive club. Outsiders need not apply.

Towards the end of summer, 1995, I happened upon Recursive Angel, perhaps one of oldest literary zines still online. Several conversations with editor David Hunter Sutherland later, an idea had formed. No, strike that. It was more of an ideal. Screw the University presses, I would start my own journal. One tailored specifically towards new writers.

The first eight issues were a hodge-podge of poetry and fiction. The artwork was amateurish, at best. The presentation was simple. The code was filled with errors, pages would crash unexpectedly, nothing was consistent. But the writing was incredible. Visceral, honest and blunt. In the beginning I had hoped to overthrow the academic empire; by the time the eighth issue was published, I had forgotten they even existed.