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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
Suite B
Lacey, WA 98503-4903
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| PAST ZINE REVIEWS | MORE ZINES |
Salt Hill Journal
Reviewed by Ingrid Woodrow
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Salt Hill Journal is, like afterDinner (reviewed this issue), a well-intentioned and worthwhile 'zine that seems to have fallen by the wayside. With a striking black-and-white layout and chock-full of content, Salt Hill comes from the English Department at Syracuse University in New York and has all the ingredients for a top-shelf 'zine. However, Issue 7, the most recent, is sadly out-of-date. From the announcement that the 'zine's Second Annual Hypertext Competition has been cancelled "due to lack of submissions," to the links page full of addresses that go nowhere, it's clear that Salt Hill desperately needs resuscitation. |
Salt Hill Journal |
Last year, when a couple of Australian writers, Josephine Wilson and Linda Carroli, were judged as the winners in Salt Hill's First Annual Hypertext Competition, it generated a lot of publicity (in Australia at least) for their work, *water writes always in *plural, and for Salt Hill, which I checked out at the time and found to be an impressive site dedicated to "putting the most innovative hypertext written today in a forum where it can be recognized, acknowledged, gushed over and read seriously." Since then, this role has been apparently been taken over by the more high-profile trAce Online Writing Community, which in conjunction with Alt-X now runs an annual hypertext contest. It's a shame there wasn't room for two.
Still, Issue 7 of Salt Hill features some excellent fiction: I loved Christine Schutt's "Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful":
"Whatever they saw looked vaguely obscene until their hearts kicked in. Then they were in a car going at easy speed past once-in-a-life fields full of a dawn and a beauty unexpected in the home state with the ugly name. She did not like to say it."
I also liked Mark Kipniss' "Small Spaces I have Been In," the narrator sitting in a bathroom lit by a yellow bug-light and highlighting lines from a textbook balanced on his lap: "It felt as if I were doing something and not doing something at the same time, as if I had suddenly discovered the answer to some vast Zen truth."
There's also some great poetry, such as Lydia Webster's "Hunger":
I wanted to be
their angel made
of flakes of
char rising
up with the blood
of buzzard
Salt Hill features (or should that be featured?), book reviews, hypertexts, essays, interviews and some interesting faux-naif images by Louise Bourgeois, the text works set in an easy-to-read layout featuring pop-up-boxes. I really like Salt Hill, and if I could be sure that there was someone still behind the scenes I'd bookmark it. But I think it's a case of, "the lights are on but nobody's home." Hello? Is anyone there?
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Ingrid Woodrow is a writer based in Brisbane, Australia. Her first novel, Goddess and the Galaxy Boy, will be published in early 2001. She is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland and working on a new novel.She is also the founding editor of the online writing journal Mangrove, which is listed as a "Site of National Significance" in the National Library of Australia's PANDORA archive.
Further information and samples of her work can be obtained by visiting www.uq.edu.au/~eniwoodr