What the Locus Is:

The Motley Focus Locus is a meta-site consisting of five heterogeneous (motley) magazines:

The Locus also hosts five Open Committees of Correspondence, a series of moderated discussion groups on , politics, religion, synchronicity, love/sex, and humor.

Stephen Williamson and William Timberman are the founding editors (we call ourselves variegators) of the Motley Focus Locus. Our purpose is to create and maintain a widely accessible and inexpensive medium for new art and new writing, to provide the growing audience on the World Wide Web an alternative to the mainstream commercial opinion and entertainment which engulfs us everywhere we turn.

The Locus began in April, 1995, and went public in September of that year with a poster mailed to friends, an advertisement placed in Poets and Writers magazine, and long hours of E-mailing and indexing on the various Web lists and search engines. For a detailed view of how we got started, see Steve's interview with Steve Wilson of Folio.

Editorial Policy:

The MFL operates in the little magazine tradition. We do not pay our contributors (although we hope to be able to do so in the future), but copyright to all original material published anywhere in MFL's pages reverts to the author upon publication. All published work will remain on our site for at least a year.

MFL variegators have only one criterion for accepting or rejecting a submission: its merits as we see them. We don't edit the content of the work we accept. (We may edit letters submitted to the committees of correspondence for length, but we never do so without first obtaining the author's permission.) If we find what we believe to be typos or spelling errors in an accepted text, we will query the author before correcting them.

Submissions Policy:

MFL's submissions policy is an open one; with a few exceptions (see Technical Details below), no prior query is necessary. Although we don't republish material which has already appeared elsewhere on the Internet, we do accept submissions which have appeared only in printed form, and simultaneous submissions are fine. We try to reply to all submissions within a week. We accept poems, stories, novel excerpts and other works in progress, as well as essays, reviews, criticism, etc. on any subject. We also maintain an electronic art gallery, and are interested in records of performance art and electronic/video art as well as scans of paintings, drawings, photographs, etc.

Although it isn't absolutely necessary, it's a good idea to indicate on your submission which magazine or committee of correspondence it is intended for. If you don't, and we accept your work, we'll publish it in the section we think most appropriate. Please indicate also if you'd allow us to include a "mailto:" link to your E-mail address, or your fax number or mailing address on your page. (We think that direct contact between artists and their public is a good idea, and we also encourage other publishers to contact MFL contributors whose work interests them.)

Technical Details:

Submissions should be sent to one of the following addresses:

E-mail:

MaryAnn Bennett Rosberg (Poetry Variegator)
mabrpoet2@speakeasy.net

William Timberman
Emeritus (Timberman is the founding Variegator of the Motley Focus)

Stephen Williamson (Other Submissions)
swilliamson@npgcable.com

US mail:

We are not accepting mail submissions until Feb 2004.

Stephen Williamson
255 Kachina Drive
Sedona, AZ 86336

E-mailing the text of poems, short-stories, essays, etc. in ASCII text format is fine. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text documents should contain only the following 96 standard characters:

space
carriage return
!@#$%^&*()_+-=[]{}\|;:'",./<>?`~
A-Z
a-z
0-9

In other words, when preparing a text submission, you should generally limit yourself to characters available on a standard typewriter, and you shouldn't use any formatting codes except carriage returns and spaces. If you write with a PC-based word processor, you should avoid "curly" quotes, em dashes, ligatures, tabs, headers, footers and the like, and you must remember to save the document in "text only" format.

You can also send formatted word-processor files as E-mail MIME attachments, if you prefer, or you can encode them (BinHex, UUcode, Base64) and include them in the body of the E-mail message. You can also mail us a PC or Mac floppy disk, accompanied by a SASE. We can read most of the common PC and Mac word-processor file formats.

Graphics may be sent to us in GIF, TIFF, JPEG, PICT, or Photoshop formats, either as MIME attachments, encoded (BinHex, UUcode, Base64) in the body of the message, or mailed to us on a PC or Mac floppy disk, accompanied by a SASE. You can submit as many images as you like, but for images larger than 100K, it is best to query us first. Captions and descriptions of the images are fine, as are artist's statements, etc. Digitized video clips and sound files are also okay, but query us first as to size, format, etc.

Return to Locus