The Bucks County Review Online Magazine is a new venture for us here at the Writers Room of Bucks County. It is a chance for us to explore beyond the boundaries of print and page, and to shake loose from the restrictions placed on print magazines by the financial realities of a nonprofit organization. It’s also a chance for us to do more, say more, include more, and share more of the best prose, poetry, critical and experimental writing, as well as the finest art in all of its many forms. In short...the structure of an ezine will give us more freedom to publish more of the wonderful writing that comes our way, and to spotlight new and emerging writers as well as the established masters.

Our former print publication, The Bucks County Writer was a fine magazine that had earned quite a lot of respect for the scope and integrity of its material, but we wanted to be able to do so much more than a print magazine would allow. The ezine format gives use that freedom.

In coming issues we’ll be featuring the kinds of material you would expect from a cutting-edge literary journal: short stories, poetry, essays and reviews; but we’ll also feature a wide variety of other kinds of writing. We’ll have First By-Lines, which will feature first stories by new writers; On the Edge, experimental writing; Underage Thinking¸ writing by some startlingly brilliant teenager writers; Making the Scene, excerpts of plays and scripts; Critical Mass, reviews of books, audio-books, film, and theater; ...Worth a Thousand Words, art galleries; Novel Encounters, serialized original novels; Books You Need to Read, excerpts of hot new books on the market; and much, much more.

So, please join us as we launch this exciting new venture. And please contact me to share your ideas for how we can continue to make the Bucks County Review the best magazine it can be.

Regards!
Jonathan Maberry, Executive Editor
Executive Director of the Writers Room of Bucks County

I also love newspapers and grew up in a household where we received both the morning and evening papers, and at least two papers on Sunday. But I must confess that while I still buy the paper on Sunday mornings, during the week, after making my morning tea, I head straight for my computer to read my newspapers online. And frankly, I read more than two. Sometimes I’ll scan as many as six, including my stalwarts, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times.

I’ve also taken to reading literary journals online. To me the three-dimensional quality of the medium immediately creates a sense of community. If an article particularly interests me, with the click of a button, I can find an author’s biography, link to their website, learn where they might be appearing. And best of all, if I’m a fan and they list an email address, I can contact them directly.

As the staff of the Bucks County Writer mulled over the transition to an online publication, we all agreed on one thing: we wanted to create a literary community on the Internet. As we paged through our hardcopy editions of the magazine, we also agreed that we are ultimately book lovers, immersed in the sensuality of paper and ink. To that end, we plan to publish a yearly print anthology of the best work appearing online.

In his groundbreaking book Understanding the Media, published in1964, the Canadian media analyst Marshall McLuhan explored electronic media as a way of collectively perceiving the world, creating a global village. It is our hope that our new online magazine will not supplant the print editions from which it sprang, but will enhance the dialogue between our readers and the artists and writers whose work we publish.

Joy E. Stocke
Editor in Chief