A Goodbye Letter from Our Founder

Dear NiftyLit Community,

It is with a heavy heart that I’m writing to let you know that I will be winding down NiftyLit operations. December 2024 will likely be the last issue/ set of new publications we release, at least with me at the helm. The future of the website itself is TBD, but please know I am working to find a way to keep everything alive and available for reading beyond NiftyLit’s formal dissolution.

It has been a roller coaster of a journey and I’ve continued to iterate NiftyLit’s business model in an effort to keep it alive in pursuit of our mission to publish exceptional writing from emerging and established writers. Life circumstances preclude me from doing so any longer. As many of you know I have a young family, a day job, and other pursuits that keep me overwhelmingly busy. NiftyLit has very much been my brain child, but I no longer have the time or resources to nurture it in the way it deserves. I am hoping that in making this change I will find more time for my own personal artistic pursuits, including continuing my own writing (and the advocacy work contained therein), which I have largely neglected to do in the past few years since starting NiftyLit (perhaps it has been a way for me to distract myself from writing about the hard things—in other words, an excuse).

Words cannot adequately express my gratitude for our contributors and anyone who ever read from our pages. I especially want to thank Katie Zeigler and Alex Burtness, part of the original NiftyLit team, for their unwavering support and selfless contributions towards our early success—we had some very promising and exciting moments where we thought we just might make it as a literary magazine that actually provides the means for writers and artists to earn meaningful monetary compensation. Katie, as EiC you were the lifeblood of the magazine, and your friendship and support during those early stages meant everything—not to mention your talents as a writer, editor, teacher, and literary citizen extraordinaire. Alex, simply put, you’re a genius and watching your mind work to figure out our early complex problems of how we were going to publish and sell writing on the blockchain consistently blew me (and many others) away.  It is reassuring to know a mind like yours is willing to take a chance on a mostly head-in-the-clouds mind like mine.

A big thanks to Alison Cooley who handled our marketing early on, getting us up and running with our newsletter, marketing kits for writers, and a number of other important tools that, had the web3 economy not tanked, I’m confident would have taken us to the moon.

I also want to thank Nick Tantillo, who has (and probably will continue for the rest of my life) taken me on as the person in his life who asks lots of technical questions about “website stuff.” Nick and I met through our mutual pursuits in web3 writing, and immediately clicked as friends and bonded over our love for publishing and our dislike for those who would use blockchain for nefarious purposes (probably the biggest downfall for the entire industry to date). Nick has been instrumental in helping me reduce NiftyLit costs by managing all ongoing web maintenance and development, and has also been responsible for prototyping and building further iterations of NiftyLit’s digital publishing marketplaces (single handedly doing what it took entire companies to do). Nick—I know we talk pretty much everyday, but I just want to say THANK YOU.

Meryl Quinn Kernell and Lucas Drummond, thank you for your amazing expertise in aesthetics and graphic design (and Quinn, for your many many many artistic contributions), designing the NifytLit logo–that I hope will live on long after we stop publications—and helping to steer us in the right direction with our website. To me it’s the most beautiful site in the enter world (wide web).

And thank you to our interns Violet, Sophie, Olivia, Finn, Han, and our thoughtful reader and overall sounding board, Edith. I know this experience has probably not been what any of us wanted for one another (to intern for a dying literary magazine) but seriously, you have been NiftyLit’s backbone for the last 6+ months, dealing with my hastily written, hard to follow emails from the BART train.

Thank you to anyone who ever submitted their writing to us. One of the greatest parts about leading a publication is getting to publish writers. One of the crummiest parts about leading a literary publication is sending out declines/ rejections. I just got one this morning from another journal (that is sadly also winding down in the next couple of months) and even though I’m used to it by now, it still sucks. Putting oneself out there via writing takes courage no matter who you are or how thick your skin is. So when I say “thank you for trusting us with your work,” I mean it. There’s a line in a song performed by Zach Bryan and Noeline Hoffman named “Purple Gas,” (originally written and performed by Hoffman, both versions are great!): “In a life having the upper hand’s a myth/ Your only fighting chance is too stubborn to quit.” In some of the toughest military training I ever did, my own personal saying was, “Just don’t quit.” I admire you all for the grit and determination it takes to even send out a small piece of one’s writing—just don’t quit.

With Gratitude,

Jo