A Letter from the Editor

e.g. journal cuts a home from the dustbin—our canvas of abandoned explorations. We publish pieces that were too focused, miscellaneous, extraneous, or experimental to incorporate into anything larger—to ‘make the cut’—but that remain fascinating in their own right. This may include a research tangent on the history of ylang-ylang perfume that couldn’t form part of a larger argument; short story scenes or variations on opening stanzas regretfully cut; or forays into new formats explored just to see where they may lead. We pair these offcuts of prose and poetry with a visual artist, who is then tasked to respond to the work with leaves from a sketchbook. Taken together, we hope the pairings can make process more visible and give explorations reinforced grounds on which to stand alone, freed from the exactitudes of final forms. E.g., in this way, seeks to mutually illuminate our writers and our artists, our traditions of Philippine arts and of Philippine letters, through their shared dimensions and in their constellated registers.
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One of our intentions in constructing a home for such various Philippine wanderings and explorations is to house them within a growing index of themes emerging from the books that Exploding Galaxies republishes—our canon of lost classics of Philippine literature. Exploding Galaxies’s first reissued novel, But for the Lovers, highlighted the themes of the carnivalesque or grotesque; our second novel, The Three-Cornered Sun, the intimacies of the domestic, for example. What we have learned is that it is one thing to republish a novel, but quite another to revive it. Our hope in creating the journal e.g. is to widen the world of Philippine letters in which we may discuss our lost classics and through which we may reinvest contemporary meaning into our long literary tradition—renewing the connections between past and contemporary, classic and experimental, lost and deleted. Each issue of e.g. resides within a theme from one of our Exploding Galaxies books, forming pinpricked pendants within what is a much larger, richer, if often unseen, discarded, or forgotten, world of letters—of other for examples extending endlessly outward from any single work.
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We both commission writing—approaching the freshest, most interesting thinkers and writers in Philippine letters for work that has not yet found the right home—and consider submissions addressed to me, our Editor. I look forward to receiving your pearls and drafts and little finds, and to bringing them into the light, at once bold and tentative.