Another example of how COVID-19 is affecting everyone these days. A multitude of magazines have stalled, and a few are folding up due to economic hardships.

This includes an anthology which was about to publish one of my poems. The editors sent me this email:

We are unfortunately now forced to make the decision to not finalize the Impact anthology as we will most likely no longer have the financial means to carry the second URL (Unincorporated.site) for our magazine.

We are honestly barely holding on to our primary literary magazine and may have to fold indefinitely.

The future is unknown as Las Vegas has taken a dramatic hit financially because of the pandemic. Many of our volunteer local readers and editors are no longer employed or only partially employed.

We appreciate all the work that was sent and enjoyed reading many of them. It was a laborious effort and we were already having to make hard decisions regarding which pieces to include.

There were so many wonderful pieces, yours included. This was the hardest decision we had to make but didn’t want to leave our contributors in limbo any longer than we already have.

Helen: A Literary Magazine is (and hopefully will be again) a biannual magazine that celebrates literary works and fine art reflecting ‘the spirit of Southern Nevada.’ (Although I’m not from the area, the editors found my poem reflected an important conflict in their community.) The magazine takes its name from the “First Lady of Las Vegas,” Helen J. Stewart, a pioneer who helped forge the valley in the 1880s.​ They have an internal division called Unincorporated which specializes in anthologies and collections, including Impact. They also run Breedlove, a literary arts blog. As of April 2020, Helen is on indefinite hiatus.

Impact was going to be an anthology focused on Social Justice, ranging from personal experiences to works of fiction. The hope was to expand readers’ perspective on what social justice means and its effects and after effects in our society. Hopefully, those many contributors and their pieces will find other opportunities to publish, to shed a menagerie of lights on our conflicts and corruptions, those things we must repair before we pass the world to our children.