The Standard Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 2

A new literary magazine for writers and aspiring writers that picks up where Writer's Digest and Poets & Writers began — a place to show our work and how we approach the pathway to truthful publication. Each issue brings together masterwork fiction and nonfiction craft features exploring how fine fiction works and why it matters.

This issue gathers its work around Edgar Allan Poe's "A Descent into the Maelstrom." Every figure in these pages is caught in a vortex of some kind — at sea, in obsession, inside a system built to erase them, beneath a verdict delivered with good intentions, or facing the oldest spiral of all — and the question the issue turns over is what becomes possible once a person sees clearly what they are inside of. Understanding does not still the vortex. Nothing does. But it is the one instrument that orients a person toward something real, and the stories collected here are five different accounts of what that orientation costs and yields.

The Standard does not accept or commission outside submissions. Original fiction in The Standard is written by students in the Story Grid Writer Mentorship Program and edited by Story Grid editors — not as illustrations of a theory but as proofs of concept that the methodology produces real work meeting a real standard. As we refine the guidance behind that work, the present issues center on masterwork short stories and craft essays — touchstones from the literary tradition that set the bar our writers are working to meet and the conversations that point the way there. Full color throughout. 108 pages. Original artwork accompanies every piece.