Guest edited by Susanne Antonetta, Joy Castro, and Barrie Jean Borich, with art by Gabrielle Katina, Brevity‘s Fall 2012 issue, “CEILING or SKY? Female Nonfictions After the VIDA Count,” is the mag’s first-ever guest-edited issue and is “focused on the important contribution of female writers to the creative nonfiction movement.”

Not only is our own feminist press pleased on principle, but we’re also delighted to note that Brevity‘s new issue includes “Choom,” new nonfiction by TSky Press author Jenny Boully (see one love affair and not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them).

At the Brevity blog, The guest editors share insights into their process.

Says Susanne Antonetta:

The VIDA count (go to http://www.vidaweb.org/the-2011-count for the 2011 numbers) confirmed something most of us women in the literary arts knew from casual counting, scrambling to get our books reviewed and the like: the rate of publication and review of women’s work is vastly sub par, though women write as much or more than their male counterparts.  I think we all wrestled with the question of how this frame affected our readings of submissions. We wanted craft, formal interest, strong writing, but we also did a cyber-happy dance when those elements united with stories we had not seen before. Which, lucky for us and thank you, gifted contributors, they frequently did.

And Sarah Fawn Montgomery:

Reading for “Ceiling or Sky? Female Nonfictions After the VIDA Count” thus became a chance to extend the possibilities for women in publishing, to resist familiar forms and focuses of femininity and seek out—or perhaps welcome what was always there, buried in the submission pile—women’s writing that has gone unnoticed or unacknowledged.  Women writers in this issue are not simply writing about what it means to be woman or challenging our understanding of women, they are writing in forms that are innovative and exciting to the genre itself, challenging the role, responsibility, and possibility of literary writing and publishing.

Read the issue here.