There are tons of lit mags out there, thousands upon thousands here in the golden age of online publishing. Why start another?
Well, because so far as we know, there is no other journal with a mission like Deep Wild: to provide a forum for the best writing we can find that conjures the experiences, observations, and insights of backcountry journeys. For a long time this has struck me as a shame and also as an irony: some of our very best and clearest perceptions and insights arise precisely when we are out there, away from all our precious comforts and distractions.
Maybe there is another such journal with a similar mission, and we just haven’t heard about it yet. But we would sure love to! As we have discovered since the start of the year when we opened for submissions, there is a wealth of well-made backcountry words, more than enough to go around. We have received poems and essays and stories from every region of the States and from beyond—Canada and Austria and England and Australia and New Zealand. It’s a marvel to me, an old school paper-and-pen dude, how such a thing could happen.
And it is a privilege to be entrusted with so much good work, although it comes with a cost—the necessity to say “thank you, but no” more often than we can possibly say “yes.” We can only trust that our would-be contributors will understand and not lose faith.
Finally, it is an inspiration to be reading these words from the wild, as we continue the exciting work of making something that, we hope, our fellow backcountry adventurers will want to take with them on their own journeys.
Rick Kempa
Deep Wild Journal 