Kathleen Rooney

Anthology, from back cover: " Rust Belt Chicago collects essays, journalism, fiction, and poetry from more than fifty writers who speak both directly and elliptically to the concerns the city shares with the region at large."

Chicago is built on a foundation of meat and railroads and steel, but its identity long ago stretched past manufacturing. A city of opportunity from the get-go, it continues to lure new residents from around the world, and from across a region rocked by recession and deindustrialization. But the problems that plague the Belt don’t disappear once you get past Gary. In fact, they’re often amplified. Chicago’s glittering downtown towers stand in sharp contrast to the struggling south and west sides. A city defined by movement that’s the anchor of the Midwest, bound to its neighbors by a shared ecosystem and economy, Chicago’s complicated – both of the Belt and beyond it. Which makes it a perfect subject for a book.

Collection of literary submissions in a variety of formats

Inside MAKE #16, “ARCHIVE,” you will find stories, poems, essays, conversations and visual art oriented around concepts of memory, preservation, photo negatives and negative hands, disappearing/reappearing faces, letters sent and never received, lost and recovered traces; in short, the archive (or its simulacrum). One is reminded of Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever”: “The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe [rule, government, beginning, origin, first place]. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.” Archives are assembled to remember a first place, an origin site that houses historical codes and modes of order, but they are also, weirdly, selective mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that strategically forget, reassemble or reorder the objects of memory. An archive remembers inasmuch as it forgets, stores away (for later), blurs, and obscures. The archive you will encounter in these pages is one that plays with these notions, and we hope you will enjoy it.

An anthology of poems written between 2011 and 2016 by the Chicago-based typewriter-poetry collective Poems While You Wait.

Collection of poems focused on Sylvia Plath.

Make is a Chicago literary magazine. It contains fiction and nonfiction as well as photography and art.

A collection of poetry and art.

Artifice Magazine is a nonprofit literary magazine published twice annually that aims, by context and content, to showcase creative work aware of its own artifice.