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MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature
Updated: 2 August 2022

About


Contributing Editors Jack Cooper Steve Davenport Kika Dorsey Contributing Editors Claire Everett Bill Mesce, Jr. Editor-in-Chief Clare MacQueen
 

As reported by The Weather Experts in the St. Petersburg Times (20 July 2007 edition, page 3):

If [you are] struck by lightning, your socks and shoes may be knocked off. The reason is the rapid evaporation and expansion of sweat on your skin. You may not be hurt if the current does not enter your body.

MacQueen’s Quinterly (aka MacQ) is the new name for the journal we published as KYSO Flash from Fall 2014 through Summer 2019. “KYSO” was our acronym for Knock Your Socks Off, which refers to the kind of electrified words and artworks that we still like to publish and showcase.

Beyond the new name and a more frequent publication schedule—that is, five times per year—our editorial focus remains essentially the same. And, like KYSO Flash, MacQ is distinguished from the majority of web-based literary journals and magazines by these features:

In addition to the Contents page, an index is available which lists works alphabetically by name of contributor and allows quick browsing of content within the website. Also available, a site map, and these resources are accessible from the navigation menus at the top and bottom of each page.

Our publisher, Clare MacQueen, provides Statistics for each issue, including the total number of submissions, the total number of works accepted for publication, and VIDA stats, the total numbers of women and men contributors.

Details about each work appear in the upper right-hand corner of the white background of the webpage. These data list the issue in which the piece appears, its genre and word count, and whether it’s a “reprint” (or more accurately a republication or reproduction), notated by “[R]” after the word count. Such details are included primarily for editorial convenience, but our readers may also appreciate having them.

Below some of our contributor bios, readers will find a section called “More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond,” which features links to optional readings. These may include other works by the contributor, interviews, essays on the craft of writing and/or on artistic techniques, and even related websites of interest—resources provided by our publisher especially for voracious readers (as she is), who are always curious to learn more.

Clare MacQueen custom designed MacQueen’s Quinterly not as an online magazine, but as a website, with a slight retro flavor. Not surprising that it looks and behaves like a website then—which she thinks is pretty cool.

 

Masthead

Jack Cooper
Senior Contributing Editor:

Photo of Jack Cooper
Photo by Daniela Le Roy


Jack Cooper is author of the poetry collection Across My Silence (World Audience, Inc., 2007). His poetry, flash fiction, essays, and mini-plays have appeared in more than 70 publications, including bosque, Bryant Literary Review, Connecticut River Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Earth Island Journal, North American Review, Rattle, Santa Fe Literary Review, Slab, Slant, The Briar Cliff Review, The MacGuffin, The Main Street Rag, and The South Dakota Review, among others.

“Elm in Dirt with Bird,” a poem from his book, will appear in a Fall 2021 anthology of nature poems forthcoming from T. S. Poetry Press. Cooper’s poetry has also been selected for Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” and Tweetspeak Poetry’s “Every Day Poems,” and his work has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize.

Awards include Grand Prize Winner in Crosswinds Poetry Journal’s 2016 poetry contest, and the poem was published in their Spring 2017 issue. One of his micro-fictions (Options, republished in Issue 3 of KYSO Flash) was selected in April 2015 as winner of the annual String-of-10 Contest, sponsored by Flash Fiction Chronicles. His play That Perfect Moment (with co-writer Charles Bartlett) was a headliner at the NOHO Arts Center in North Hollywood and The Little Victory in the 2009-10 seasons.

Cooper served as co-editor of MacQ’s sister journal, KYSO Flash, from 2016 thru 2019 (Issues 6–12).

Steve Davenport
Contributing Editor:
Photo of Steve Davenport Steve Davenport is author of three poetry collections, Bruise Songs (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2020), Overpass (Misty Publications, 2012), and Uncontainable Noise (Pavement Saw Press, 2006); as well as two chapbooks, Murder on Gasoline Lake (originally published in Black Warrior Review and listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2007), and Nine Poems and Three Fictions (available in The Literary Review’s Summer 2008 chapbook issue).

A story in The Southern Review earned him a Special Mention in Pushcart Prizes 2011. In June 2012, Massachusetts Review published three installments from his “Black Guy Bald Guy” series of fictions.

Author’s website: www.gasolinelake.com

Author’s Faculty Page at the University of Illinois

 
Kika Dorsey
Contributing Editor:

Photo of Kika Dorsey
Photo by Jack Greene


Kika Dorsey is a poet, fiction writer, and educator who lives with her two children, husband, and pets in Colorado. Her poems have been published in Freshwater, KYSO Flash, The Columbia Review, The Comstock Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and numerous other journals and books. Her writing has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize.

She is the author of four books: the full-length collection Occupied: Vienna Is a Broken Man & Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020), which won the Colorado Authors’ League Award for best poetry collection; two full-length collections published by WordTech Editions, Coming Up for Air (2018) and Rust (2016), the latter of which was reviewed by Clare MacQueen in KYSO Flash (Issue 6, Fall 2016); and a chapbook, Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010).

Ms. Dorsey is also an instructor of English at Front Range Community College and works as a writing coach, editor, tutor, and ghostwriter. In her free time, she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.

Author’s website: http://kikadorsey.com

 
Claire Everett
Contributing Editor:
Photo of Claire Everett Claire Everett is the author of two tanka collections, twelve moons and The Small, Wild Places; and co-author of Hagstones: A Tanka Journey with Joy McCall, and Talking in Tandem with her husband, Tony Everett. In 2017, Claire joined the editorial panel for the Red Moon Anthology. She served on the editorial team for Take Five Best Contemporary Tanka (Volume 4, 2011), and in 2015 she edited the Tanka Society of America’s Members’ Anthology, Spent Blossoms.
 
She served as tanka-prose editor for Haibun Today [from December 2011 thru September 2016], and as founding editor of Skylark Publishing and Skylark: the journal [from the inaugural issue in April 2013 thru the final issue, Summer 2019].

Claire is mum to five children and step-mum to two and likes nothing better than to be cycling through the Dales with Tony on their trusty tandem Tallulah, or walking on the North Yorkshire Moors.

 
Bill Mesce, Jr.
Contributing Editor:
Front Cover of Inside the Rise of HBO, by Bill Mesce Jr.
Award-winning author, screenwriter, and playwright Bill Mesce, Jr. holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University and now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Maine, Farmington. He is the author of two dozen screenplays and numerous novels, including critically acclaimed The Advocate: A Novel of World War II (2000), and its follow-ups, Officer of the Court (2001) and The Defender (2005).
 
A former corporate writer at HBO (27 years), he is also the author of Idols, Icons, and Illusions: The Movies We Love—and Love to Hate—and the People Who Made Them (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2015), and Inside the Rise of HBO: A Personal History of the Company that Transformed Television (McFarland, 2015).

Other published books include No Rule that Isn’t a Dare: How Writers Connect with Readers (Serving House Books, 2016) and The Rules of Screenwriting and Why You Should Break Them (McFarland, 2017).

Mesce is a native of New Jersey and a two-time recipient of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grant Award (for playwriting and for prose).
 
Editor-in-Chief / Curator:
Clare MacQueen

In the photo at right, circa late-1950s, Clare MacQueen is three years old, wearing pig-tails and truly tickled, probably just to hear herself laugh. Though she’s been “grown-up” for a decade or two, she still believes that Silliness and Laughter are among Life’s greatest blessings and pleasures.

Founding Editor at Three Years Old: Life is One Big Laugh!

Clare is founding editor, webmaster, publisher, and curator of MacQ, the “sister” arts and literary journal to KYSO Flash, the latter of which she founded in 2014 and retired in 2019. With the help of her former co-editor Jack Cooper, they published more than a thousand works in KYSO Flash by 400+ authors and artists. Through her micro-press, KYSO Flash Press (retired in 2020), she designed and produced 20 printed books including six annual anthologies.

Photo of Clare MacQueen, by Gary Gibbons
Photo by Gary Gibbons
Botanical Gardens in
Bellevue, WA (2006)


Clare also served as Webmaster and Associate Editor for Serving House Journal (SHJ) from its inception in January 2010 through its retirement in May 2018 after publishing 18 issues. During the years of its active publication, SHJ was ranked by Web del Sol as among the Top 50 Literary Magazines.

Since 2019 she has served on the Senior General Advisory Board for The Best Small Fictions, now published by The Sonder Press.

Tara L. Masih, award-winning editor and author of books such as Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and My Real Name is Hanna (among others), founded The Best Small Fictions (BSF) anthology series in 2014.

In 2017 and 2018, Clare was a member of the General Advisory Board for BSF, then published by Braddock Avenue Books.

For the 2016 edition of BSF, published by Queen’s Ferry Press, she served as Assistant Editor, Domestic. And for the debut issue, published in 2015, she was one of two roving editors.

Clare’s short fiction and poetry have been published in New Flash Fiction Review, Firstdraft, Bricolage, and Serving House Journal.

Two of her small fictions: Tasting the New and Dog Days

One of her essays was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in Best New Writing 2007, where it earned an Eric Hoffer Best New Writing Editor’s Choice Award. Another of her essays, The Fragrance of Levity, was also nominated for a Pushcart; it appears in Serving House Journal (Fall 2011) and in the anthology Winter Tales II: Women on the Art of Aging.

Several of Clare’s reviews have been published in MacQ, KYSO Flash, and Serving House Journal. Three examples:

“No Succinct Summary Will Do Them Justice” [A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries From 80 American Poets on Their Prose Poetry edited by Peter Johnson]

Tip-of-the-Iceberg Stories: Grant Faulkner’s Fissures: One Hundred 100-Word Stories

“Where the Mind’s Scribbling Ends” [Beneath the Coyote Hills by William Luvaas]

Web work: Clare’s frustrations as a Web surfer led her to design her first website in 1999. Ever since, she has kept things simple, even “old-fashioned”: design and build user-friendly sites that are easy on the eyes and easy to navigate.

Education and Training: In 1990, Clare was awarded a BA degree in English/Creative Writing from San Diego State University. She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, under the name of Lisa Marie Smith (former married name). She also studied British Lit, publishing, and technical writing at the graduate level. And she worked for eight years as a technical editor at the University of Washington.

 
Contact us via webmail: MacQuinterly [at] gmail [dot] com

 
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