1. What is civil conversation?
The fact that this has to be stated explicitly speaks to the way in which "new media" is actually bad media for many people. Something to avoid rather than to participate in. Radical content attracts people who are marginal and that is a pleasure and a curse. A curse because every attempt at having a certain kind of conversation (in this context we will call it a building-idea kind) can be disrupted by nonsense. A pleasure because the place where people are starting the conversations can be enlightening.
The Anvil will enforce civil conversation by the subjective view of the editors. This probably means that we will use Drupal to "unpublish" comments that are shrill in tenor. We will try to keep the critical "meta" conversation about site procedure off the pages where we are having the conversations that this site is actually about…
Contestation. Transgression. Engagement.
2. What is a review essay?
We would like to believe this is a wide open category that includes poetry about something that was inspiring and an angry rant against something infuriating. Most commonly we expect a readable, informed, article by someone who is arguing as if they have something at stake.
Criticism has, for too long, been something that is either seen as something that people do in university or only do with their enemies. We are trying to create a place where we can talk about the things that we care in a way that honors how complex our feelings often are.
3. How do I submit my writing?
You can use the form on the lower right hand site (Create Content) or send an email to anvil@theanvilreview.org. Either way is safe but email is faster and can provide some way for us to have a dialogue about the content before it is posted.
4. Print? Is it dead?
Yes and no. Print is not financially sustainable and isn’t going to be for the forseeable future for interesting content BUT it is the intention of The Anvil to release a print edition every 3-6 months anyway. How will we do it? Excellent question. We will probably offer subscriptions and a couple of generous doners to get started… but that chapter has yet to be written.