Our Not-So-Long-and-Illustrious History

story

Monday Night began in 2001 with an Oakland, California-based writing group that met at members’ houses every Monday night. After sharing our stories and poems with each other for several months, we decided to take a stab at self-publishing by collecting some of our work together and making a small literary journal ingeniously entitled Monday Night.

The effort was a lot of work but also a lot of fun, so after the premier issue sold out in several local bookstores, in 2003 we produced Monday Night Two, which began to include the work of other artists. Issue 3 was completely devoted to featuring the work of outside writers, and since then we've grown into a full-fledged literary journal publishing the best new writing we can find.

This website is the final piece of Monday Night, a way to stretch beyond the San Francisco Bay Area and really seek out the finest new and emerging writers from across the country and around the world.

motive

When we started, none of us had published in anything larger than a college literary journal. But we wanted to get our writing out there, get the thrill of seeing our names in print and sharing our work with friends. These days, our fiction and poems have appeared in numerous regional and national publications, but Monday Night continues in order to spread the excitement of first publication to new writers.

website

Mondaynightlit.com is primarily a vehicle to promote our print journal. There are hundreds of excellent e-zines out there, but we're still partial to ink on paper. Despite the cost and extra effort, we want to keep producing a print publication that is small but beautiful, professionally designed and illustrated, yet still open to the work of new and emerging writers.

This site contains a few samples of art and writing so you can see what we like to publish. Please visit the purchase page to find out how to obtain a copy for yourself, and the submit page to read our guidelines for submissions.

editors

Sharon McGill is a writer and artist who received her MFA in fiction from Penn State University. Her fiction and reviews have been published in Opium, The Indiana Review, Redivider, 580 Split and The Chattahoochee Review, while her illustrations have appeared in The Whirligig, Zine World and the occasional bathroom stall. In matters of taste, she prefers sour and bitter to sweet or salty. Gin and tonic with extra lime, anyone?

Rob Pierce is an aspiring pornographer. He was told by God to be an agnostic and he writes because the voices in his head prefer to be thought of as muses.

Jessica Wickens was born and raised in a small town in northern Michigan, ran away to Chicago, and now lives in Oakland, California. She has worked in car factories, greasy restaurants, eerily quiet offices, and most recently at a lively youth services agency. Her poems have appeared in Whiskey Island Magazine, The Peralta Press, Floating Holiday, The Whirligig, and Eleven Eleven. She received her MFA in Writing at California College of the Arts. She wants to visit Antarctica.