a blog about the long ending of a literary journal
endpapers are the beautifully marbled papers found at the beginning and end of an old book. they indicate a level of care and attention to detail to the art of publishing and the experience of the reader that is rare to find in a mass-produced book today. treated most often today as a beautiful curiosity, a lost art, or a bespoke feature to justify an exorbitant price tag, endpapers have more to tell us about ritual and reading and engagement.
in the context of smoke and mold, endpapers is a blog that will document the end of many things. the impending end of our operations as a publication in 2031. the end of seeking new work that speaks to this transitional moment through a lens of transition, not because writers do not continue producing new and interesting work long after we’ve ceased our publishing operations, but because they are speaking to a new moment, a moment that marks the start of a new chapter with new responsibilities and preoccupations.
endpapers are also found at the beginning of a book, because the beginning of a book or publication is also technically an end. endpapers will also document the beginning of our archival process. beginnings must necessarily have an end on one side, a demarcation between everything that came before it began so that it might begin at all. smoke and mold will cease to exist, as stated in our original editorial statement from 2019, but the goal is not to erase all traces of our existence. instead, as the yardstick flips over and we begin descending the slope of our allotted time, we want to begin thinking very intentionally about how we will archive and honor and celebrate all the work that has appeared in our “pages,” including the work we have yet to read.
endpapers do not mourn the end. they celebrate it as a chance for something new and beautiful to grow up in the vacuum an ending creates. like a star exploding or a tree falling, smoke and mold eagerly looks forward to what will rush to fill in the space of our absence. already it has been exciting to see a flourishing of trans and Two-Spirit voices on the changes both necessary and terrifying. smoke and mold holds no illusions that this is because of our existence. we are merely pleased to have been witness to and a small part of this flourishing. and we look forward to maintaining a record of this moment in time, so that others in the future will know it happened. so that they won’t have to start over from scratch.
moving forward, endpapers will be the place to find our metacommentary on our end, as well as any news and updates about the journal. you could call it a newsletter, and if we can figure out how to distribute it through channels that are unbeholden to egomaniacal culture brokers, then you might interface with it as such. smoke and mold has never been very active on social media outside of issue launches and posting about calls for submissions, and this is unfortunate because the most interesting engagements around art and transition and time and environment have happened behind the scenes, in our meetings and conversations, in our inbox exchanges with writers and editors, and most probably in the network of minds that make this journal work. we hope that endpapers will be a place where you can read a little more about these insights, and more.