Before saying farewell, let us first look at who we were. We were a creative nonfiction magazine seeking to make meaning, or sense of the world through the use of the creative nonfiction form. We printed graphic memoir, narrative image, we printed list essays, segmented essays, lyric essays and stream of consciousness. Many essays used the solid platform of personal narrative and many more defied categorizations such as the video essay and podcast essay. We provoked thought about the genre through the reviews and interviews and innovation of form that celebrates and welcomes writers and their thoughts. We saw the internet and our online publication as our liminal space.
Crossing boundaries in form means new voices new themes. We celebrated emerging voices and racial and gender diversity. We sought out the creative questioning and journeying process of an essay, even if, or especially if, there were no codified answers. Creative nonfiction incorporates the rhythms and sounds of poetry, the character and voice of fiction, the dilemmas and arc of drama, it inculcates the parsing and reshaping of lives and dialogues, thought, and analysis by the reshaping of literary form itself. So going through an issue of Punctuate was like a dance. It had movement; it was true to its moment and culture.
We want to thank all of our contributors, our student editors, interns, and faculty editors for walking the path with Punctuate and bearing witness, along the way, to the power of art to effect and transform.
True to the movement of creative nonfiction, Punctuate is ceding itself and its mission to a new publication. The new publication, Allium, will also be produced by the remarkable faculty and students of the creative writing program at Columbia College Chicago and will be available online in the near future. Allium will continue Punctuate’s mission of publishing the best creative nonfiction—and include poetry and fiction as well. Please watch for this announcement.
Diversity, Creativity, Peace,
Re’Lynn Hansen and Garnett Kilberg Cohen,
and the editors of Punctuate. A Nonfiction Magazine