I was working on a small press college literary magazine that was published only once a year and ran a couple of contests with some fairly big bucks. That meant we had to sift through a lot of submissions that were good, bad and crazy. And then there were the ones that didn't follow the rule - nothing submitted that had been previously published. It's one of the rules that nearly all small press literary magazines follow. Everyone wants FNASR: First North American Serial Rights, or First Rights. It didn't make sense to me. Many of these magazines have a limited run that is read in limited areas, so a lot of great stories don't get the wide audience they deserve, like the one I just read in an old copy of HFR.

Wouldn't it be cool, I thought, to have a magazine that did nothing but SNASR: Second Rights. Such a magazine should feature poets, fiction writers, and essay writers, three each, with no preference given to genre. And a play, I wanted a play. Not too big, the size of a modern paperback, something you could slip into your purse, briefcase, or backpack. And full of words; no padding it with big margins, big type and lots of blank pages.

And that is how the idea of Second Writes, a magazine of well over 37,000 words, enough for a novel, yet slim, with enough genres to satisfy most, came about.