Longshot!

Longshot Radio: Creativity and Failure -- The Results

Sat, 05 May 2012 15:12:53 -0700

Longshot Radio: Creativity and Failure -- The Results:

Whew. From noon Thursday to Friday evening, Longshot Radio and Radiolab used the 99% Conference in NYC as our home to talk about creativity, failure, and revision.

In a little under 30 hours we received over 75 pieces of raw tape, and ended up with 25 finished stories. We wanted to find a…

Here’s a little doc by our friends Roshelle Fong and Jane...

Fri, 04 May 2012 08:46:00 -0700

Here’s a little doc by our friends Roshelle Fong and Jane Lee who came and shot the making of the last issue of Longshot.

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

(by holeywoodproductions)

Longshot Radio is back! Sort of! This Thursday and Friday, the...

Tue, 01 May 2012 14:24:09 -0700

Longshot Radio is back! Sort of!

This Thursday and Friday, the fine folks of RadioLab have asked us to attend the 99% Conference to tell stories about experimentation, failure, and creativity.

And we want you to get involved. Tell us a story, answer a question, try out a crazy idea.

Thursday and Friday, loads more info on the RadioLab blog.

What's Next For Longshot Radio? Find Out, And Help Out

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:13:41 -0700

What's Next For Longshot Radio? Find Out, And Help Out

Attention white earbud owners: Longshot Radio, now on iTunes.

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:32:03 -0700

Attention white earbud owners: Longshot Radio, now on iTunes.

The Making Of Longshot Magazine Number Two

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:37:39 -0700

The Making Of Longshot Magazine Number Two:

Wendy’s art is so good, it deserved its own domain. You’re going to love this.

The Making of Longshot, by Wendy MacNaughton Part One Part Two

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 10:51:00 -0700

The Making of Longshot, by Wendy MacNaughton

Part One

Part Two

And the bounty goes to...

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 11:44:28 -0700

We are delighted to announce that the Longshot editors have selected Aholaah Arzah, author of Ring Cycle, to receive our $2000 feature fee. As Mat put it, when the three of us read this story together in a Gakwer conference room last weekend, we let out a collective gasp. We love the multi-layered interpretation of “debt” and admire the beautiful use of language. Congratulations, Aholaah!

Since you all may be curious to know a little bit more about Aholaah, here’s a short Q&A…[SPOILER ALERT! If you don’t want us to ruin the ending, go read the story first.]

LS: Tell us a little about yourself…where do you live? What do you do for a living?

AA: I live as nearly surrounded by water as possible without actually being on an island…Port Townsend is located at the tip of the Quimper Peninsula in the Puget Sound; a beautiful small town with a vibrant arts community…I work with individuals with special needs as an independent living aid.

LS: How long have you been writing?

AA: I have written intermittently along with making visual art and raising children for many years. I recently completed my MFA in Creative Writing and am focused on writing.

LS: Where have you been published before?

AA: Over the years, I have been published in a number of small literary magazines: Seattle Voice, Poets West, Brussels Sprout, Clay Drum, Chrysanthemum, among others…recently; the Pitkin Review, elimae and upcoming in Short, Fast and Deadly.

LS: It appears your primary writing vein is poetry. What prompted you to write a piece like this one?

AA: My “poetry” of the last two years has been “hybrid” or prose-like and most recently I been writing more intentionally in a prose form although I rarely feel a need to distinguish between these forms.

LS: How did you hear about Longshot?

AA: A fellow Goddardite (graduate of Goddard College) posted a link on facebook.

LS: What was your process for writing the piece? Did the theme trigger the idea or did you already want to write about it and the theme fit?

AA: The theme triggered a recognition…I had had the idea to write something about the irony of the ring and my relationship with my father and it personified a particular kind of “debt” that was the only debt I really wanted to write about at the moment…

LS: When did you begin writing the piece?

AA: Sometime during the morning before the deadline…

LS: Will you show this story to anyone else in your family?

AA: Yes.

LS: Other than your own, what’s your favorite story in the Debt issue of the magazine?

AA: I haven’t had the chance to read everything yet but “Appraisal” struck a chord…home “ownership” is an interesting delusion…

LS: Did you really pawn the ring? If so did you ever get it back?

AA: Yes, I really pawned the ring and no, I never wanted to see it again.

LS: And finally, are you going to use this money to pay off any debts?

AA: Oh, yeah…

"Surround yourself with talented people you trust and then let them step up. In our real lives we..."

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 11:41:27 -0700

“Surround yourself with talented people you trust and then let them step up. In our real lives we often have the luxury of time and titles to question and prod and re-do. Often that’s what makes for really great art, but it’s good to be reminded that you can work from a position of fundamental trust as well.”

- Association of Independents in Radio talks about the Longshot Radio process.

Do you love the Circles of Influence print from the Debt issue...

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 10:13:01 -0700

Do you love the Circles of Influence print from the Debt issue of Longshot? Great! You can buy it on Etsy

laphamsquarterly: Created this weekend over the course of six...

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:53:21 -0700

laphamsquarterly:

Created this weekend over the course of six hours as part of Longshot magazine’s Debt issue, “Circles of Influence” is a chart of artistic, scientific, and philosophical debts through time. It’s also very pretty and something we’d like to hang on our wall.

Listen to a Longshot Radio interview about the making of this chart with Michelle Legro of Lapham’s Quarterly, Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, and illustrator Wendy MacNaughton.

2 Days Later, Let’s Welcome Longshot Magazine Issue Two | MagCloud Blog

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 07:23:32 -0700

2 Days Later, Let’s Welcome Longshot Magazine Issue Two | MagCloud Blog

"Standing on the rooftop of Gawker Media with some of Longshot’s web team, watching the sun rise..."

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:26:21 -0700

“Standing on the rooftop of Gawker Media with some of Longshot’s web team, watching the sun rise Sunday after a sleepless night of coding, I said, “I don’t even know how I got here. I’m just some kid from Fresno.” Adam responded, “We’re all just kids from somewhere.””

- I came, I saw, I coded.

Longshot Contributor’s Badge MagCloud made this great...

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:58:41 -0700

Longshot Contributor’s Badge

MagCloud made this great badge for contributors to use. You can post it to your blog or Facebook page (or whatever else) and link back to the magazine. The code is below.

http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/223579/follow” class=”test_navToIssue” style=”font-size:0px;line-height:0;border:none;”>

Longshot Magazine’s Portland Satellite Office (aka PDX...

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:19:27 -0700

Longshot Magazine’s Portland Satellite Office (aka PDX Moonshot Group). Illustration by Hami Suh.

Longshot // Publish: All

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 11:19:00 -0700

The downside of getting so many great submissions is that it means we don’t get to publish a lot of great work. So before we went to press this time, we decided that we wanted to publish everything everyone submitted. That’s right, everything.

Longshot is an exercise in creativity. It’s an experiment defined by two constraints: a limited time period, and a theme. We want to get people excited about being creative. We want to give you an excuse to write that story, take that photo, paint that portrait that you’ve been meaning to do for so long. Get it out. Jam.

And we don’t just want to encourage that spirit on the weekend. And we very much want to encourage you to do something with your work. We want people to see it.

Last time, we promised that if you posted your work online, we’d link to it from our blog. That seemed to work out well, but not everybody was able to post their stuff online, and it still left quite a bit of awesome work hiding in the darkness of our submission engine, Submishmash, never to be seen again.

So we came up with a new plan. We’re going to put all of the 672 submissions we received online. Every. Single. One.

Internally, we’ve been calling this Longshot Raw. And we’re super-excited to have a way to let everyone’s work hit daylight. Well. That is, unless you don’t want us to.

On our submission page for Longshot this time, we noted that “[w]e will make everything submitted available online after the 48 hour period is over.” But after we re-announced that on yesterday’s blog post, we’ve gotten a few emails from people who don’t want their stuff published, and essentially saying, “cut it out.”

Okay! No problem!

In all sincerity, we thought our intentions were clear from the get go. But we also know that it’s easy to skim over a form, or to not quite get what we meant.

So, to be clear, here’s the plan. We’re going to bundle all the submissions together in an archive file, and release that via a torrent file. But because we know that some of you don’t want your submissions included, we’re going to give you a week to remove them before we do that.

If you don’t want us to include your work in the Longshot Raw file, it’s easy to remove your submission. Here’s how to do it.

1. Log into Submishmash again. (Submishmash remembers your password even if you don’t. They can email it to you if you’ve forgotten.)

2. Go to your My Submissions page.

3. Click on the “withdraw” link next to your work.

That’s it! Done!

If you pull your submissions, we won’t include them in the torrent. Otherwise, we look forward to seeing you next week in Longshot Raw.

Longshot Radio is live as of Sunday afternoon. Take a listen...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 04:56:00 -0700

Longshot Radio is live as of Sunday afternoon. Take a listen here.

Your Longshot Contributors, Issue Two

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 12:00:00 -0700

Forty-eight hours ago we gave you guys an assignment, twenty-four hours ago you turned in your stories, and today we made a magazine. Despite the fact that we’ve only spent a collective 6 days streamlining this process, it seems to get easier every time. That’s thanks in large part to the amazing turnout of NYC’s media mavens — but even more thanks to all of you. Though it seemed nearly impossible to choose from all the excellent submissions, we’ve assembled a pretty kick-ass issue.

Whether or not your work made it into the edited magazine, we’ll be making every submission available online in torrent form.

But for now, congratulations and thank you to our wonderful contributors! Here’s our Issue Two Table of Contents:

A Parable
by Chris Baker

Cash on Delivery
by Tim Maly and Emily Horne

5 Questions
by Tony Hightower

Name’s Sake
by Haugen Mendeola

Asphalt Default
by Karen Unland

El Cobrador del Frac
by Kati Krause

Items in My Mother’s Basement That She Believes She Is Saving For Family Members
by Dan Kois

Exit Sandman
by Harper Honan

Vulturing
by Erin Griffith

One Thing Leads to Another
by Mary Wiltenburg

There’s a Lot of Waiting, at the End
by S.E. Smith

Facebank
by Philip Bump

Changing Faces
by Adam Rothstein

Circles of Influence
by Michelle Legro & Maria Popova
Illustrations by Wendy MacNaughton

Zero Sum
by Martin Connelly

Mousetrapped
by Anonymous

Coming Clean on Dirty Laundry
by Rachel Swaby & Tim Leong

Grade AA
by Kristen Taylor

The Price of Life
by Timothy Lesle

A Letter to My Student Loan
by Buck Weiss

I Owe ___ for ____

by Craig Damrauer

Sex and Balances
by Anonymous

Re-Wilding
by Lucas Foglia

Appraisal
by Paul Ford

Water to Dust
by Heather Hansman

Sideswiped
by David Wolman

Financial Theater
by Pat Walters

What Was Left Behind
by McNair Evans

Ginsberg’s Failure
by Steve Silberman

Diamonds Aren’t Forever
by Jonathan Snyder & Angela Watercutter

For Richer or Poorer
by Jonathan Snyder & Angela Watercutter

Money in the Tank
by Patrick Di Justo

Home Away from Home
by Lex Kumar

Ring Cycle
by Aholaah Arzah

Alternative Currency
by Anonymous

Record Collectors
by Michael Barthel

Gifted Children
by Joanna Pearlstein

Once Found, Now Lost
by Chris Smith

Smoke on Vine
by David Harris

Alan Greenspan Fanfic
by Rob Dubbin

Special Report: Into the Debtpocalypse

by Aaron Britt, Drew Himmelstein, Michelle Legro, Anne-Louise Brittain

Art and Photos by:

McNair Evans, M. Scott Brauer, Jon Snyder, Mark Giglio, Susie Cagle, Wendy MacNaughton, Simon Lutrin, and Patrick Hruby

Letters to the Editor

A Note From Our Managing Editor

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 19:28:23 -0700

Hey gang,

First off, everyone is doing an amazing job editing, fact-checking, designing, and moving stories along. We’re well ahead of last year’s pace, so keep doing what you’re doing. The fact that we can see anything remotely resembling a finish line, at this point, is a testament to your awesomeness.

Of course, our plan for this issue is more ambitious than anything we’ve ever done, so pace yourself, drink plenty of fluids (scotch, water, whatever), and (above all) make sure you’re communicating when you’re moving something along.

To that end, if you’ve been assigned a story to edit in 01, please do that before anything else. And please make sure you’re editing the story in Google Docs, not SubMishMash. When you’re done with that, email Erin Biba to let her know and she’ll move the file to 02. Please let me know if you don’t see the story in Google Docs, and I’ll investigate.

Choire and Joel are heroically pushing all stories from 02 to 03, once the first edit is done. And once the story is in 03, it gets fact-checked and moved to 04. It’d be great if we could get most or all of the fact-checking done tonight, perhaps by 11:30. That way, the art department and web teams can start flowing in copy into their respective designs. (Mind you, this copy will also be copy-edited/spot-checked once more in proof, so remember this 04 copy is not final, but it’s damn close.)

If you have any questions at all on anything ever, please don’t hesitate to ask. You guys are an unprecedented cast of rock stars, and this is going to be beyond anything we’ve ever put out, so thank you for all you’ve done so far and let’s get this fucker done.

-e

Can we use curse words? Or should I delete them? I'm usually kind of an aggressive writer, guys, but I can tweak the piece of deemed necessary!

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 11:21:31 -0700

We shall not be offended.