It’s been a busy summer since our last blog and the arrival of our very first issue.  The staff of South85 spent the summer working at their day jobs, taking care of family, and, of course, cranking out the pages.  But, alas, summer is nearly over.  The good news is that we get to dive back into the journal.  Our fall issue will be out very soon, and we will be accepting submissions again beginning September 30.  We are especially excited about our switch to Submishmash as our method of submission, which will make everything much easier and reliable for both writers and staff.

The blog will be back up and running, too, with entries from staff (and maybe some guest bloggers, too.) Which leads me to my other reason for writing: we needed to break our blog silence!  After an entire summer without a single entry, I’m afraid I’m woefully out of practice.  As I thought about what to write, I kept coming back to my summer reading.

I am an organized person, and I like to have a plan.  The same often goes for my reading, and this isn’t the first summer that I set out with a reading agenda.  The summer between my junior and senior years in college, I tried to see how many titles I could read from an MFA suggested reading list.  This summer, I went on a Philip Roth binge.  I had never read any Roth and always meant to, and I’ve often heard it suggested that you can learn a lot from a writer by reading everything they’ve ever written in one long stretch.  You can see their growth as a writer and make discoveries about what’s important to them.  Sounds great, except Philip Roth is prolific.  Really prolific.  (What can I say? I’m weak.  There were other tantalizing books stacking up on my nightstand.)  I chose three.  Actually, “chose” is a bit of an exaggeration.  I read three titles that a friend lent me.  The best part is that the titles were from different ends of his career.  I started with The Ghost Writer (1979), and then followed that up with American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000.)

I won’t bore you with all my thoughts on the books.  Suffice it to say, they left me hungry for more. The best part was the hours of discussion they created between me and the friend who lent me the books, hours of discussion that led to other far-flung topics and ideas that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.  And isn’t that a big reason why we read/write literary fiction in the first place?  To make us think and then share those thoughts with others?

So, if you’ve never done it before, I encourage you to pick an author and go nuts.  It doesn’t have to be fiction.  Try it with poetry or essay collections.  Only, please take a break from your full-on immersion to check out our fall issue.  See you September 30!

Sarah Gray