About White Whale Review

Published quarterly, White Whale Review is an online literary magazine devoted to the single-minded pursuit of that which eludes easy capture: "beauty"; "truth"; the fictions that window or curtain each. Those skeletally abstract words for ideas best suggested in tangible form, what we want is a dialogue between art and the world lodged hard in the throat of things. White Whale Review stands as a forum for poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction from both established and new writers, favoring quality over genre or theme. The successful work is an incandescent fiat—firefly or lightning  brief, maybe, but lux nonetheless—against the dusk and dimming terrain of modern existence.

The Editorial Process

Although there are nominal genre editors, this is, to a large degree, a practical measure for the division of administrative duties. All aspects of the journal's operation are profoundly collaborative, from solicitation through to final selection, and each editor has heavily influenced the final product.

About The Editors

Jim Cronin
Founding Editor, Poetry

Jim Cronin is a poet and journalist living in Boston, MA, and holds a B.A. from Suffolk University. He has been a regular contributor to various sections of The Boston Globe, The Brockton Enterprise, and other area publications and is currently a staff writer at a weekly newspaper. Jim has been studying poetry with Boston-area poet and workshop leader Tom Daley since the summer of 2007, and is a member of the New England Poetry Club. His poem "Memories of the Elevated Subway" appeared in The Somerville News. He has lived and worked in Ireland and Germany and traveled to parts between. He has served as editor for "The Last Supper," a film, art, and music festival held annually in Brooklyn, NY, as well as its accompanying publication, aptly named The Last Supper.

Works exemplifying his idea of poetic excellence include: Robert Lowell's "The Public Garden"; A.R. Ammons's “Hymn”; Jane Kenyon ‘s “Portrait of a Figure Near Water”; James Wright’s “A Blessing”; and Eugenio Montale’s “In the Greenhouse”; Laurie Sheck's “And water lies plainly".

Randi Shapiro

Founding Editor, Fiction; Webmaster

Randi Shapiro is currently pursuing a M.F.A. in fiction writing at Washington University in St. Louis. A Wellesley College alumna, she is married to five or six dead writers at any given time. In 2000, she won the Dyer-Ives Annual Poetry Contest judged in that year by Thomas Lux. She served for two years as fiction and poetry editor for the college literary journal Display Magazine, in addition to an award-winning stint as the news editor of the school's newspaper. She has studied with Pankaj Mishra and Frank Bidart; once, and awestruck, she asked Seamus Heaney to sign a tumbled scrap of notebook paper. That signature still exists, somewhere.

 

You will most frequently find her married to Nabokov, Faulkner, Bellow, Cheever, Rilke, Proust, and/or Chekhov, depending upon barometric pressure, sea level, and the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow.

Amos Wright

Founding Editor, Nonfiction

Amos Wright is a writer currently living in Birmingham, AL, and pursuing a M.A. with a concentration in creative writing at University of Alabama at Birmingham. He holds a double B.A. in philosophy and English from UAB. His poetry has been published in Aura Literary Arts Review and the Birmingham Arts Journal; he is currently at work on four novels: ...And the Grass Shall Grow Over Your Cities, The Sins of Jefferson County, and Southern Death. He is also co-founder and chief contributing editor of The Built Society, an electronic think tank for the interdisciplinary investigation of issues in sustainability, ecology, economics, architecture, urban planning, aesthetics, philosophy, the sciences, ethics, environmentalism and political and social theory,

as well as the co-founder and chief contributing editor of The Heaviest Corner, an electronic think tank which analyzes and critiques the city of Birmingham's urban history and development.

 

The writers he finds most valuable include: Theodor Adorno , D.H. Lawrence, Aldo Leopold , Bertrand Russell , Thoreau , Annie Dillard, Molly Nesbit, Richard Rorty, Gilles Deleuze, John Dewey, Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman , William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, John McPhee, George Orwell, Leibniz , Wittgenstein , Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Schlegel , Marx & Engels, Slavoj Zizek , Jacques Lacan , John Muir, George Gamow, Derrida, David Bohm, Norman Mailer, John Reed, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, William Gaddis, WS Merwin, Don DeLillo, VS Naipaul, Paul Auster, Saul Bellow, Thomas Mann, Elias Canetti, Joseph McElroy, et al.

Read his call for nonfiction here.