Your Paid Subscription to The Berkshire Review: how to get the most out of it, a message from the Editor

Howard Pyle, Early Printers, etching

Thanks, once again, to all the people who signed up on the first day!

Now that The Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts, is available by paid subscription only, we all feel more committed than ever to bringing you the best criticism and intelligence we can, wherever we happen to be in the world. Our goals are by no means comprehensive...just what a small, enthusiastic team can accomplish. We are scattered, but in interesting places.

From the beginning I thought of The Berkshire Review as a traditional magazine, distributed electronically. All of us write traditional essays and reviews, with introductions, expositions, arguments, and conclusions. None of us write blog entries, which usually lack that kind of structure, are grounded more in opinion than on knowledge, and are innocent of the extensive research that goes into many of the articles and reviews we publish. The only difference is that, since we don't have to buy paper and print ads on that paper to pay for it, our articles can be as long as they need to be in order to make their point. We observe no formulaic lengths or formats. By this I do not mean to disparage bloggers in any way. Many of them are experts in their fields, prepare their posts through research, and are effective writers. Blogging is a mode of writing unto itself. The decision not to pursue it was a personal one, which I considered at length, when I first began to write for online publication. I felt it would detract from the various forms of print-based writing I had worked at for many years: scholarly writing, fiction, and essays. I have never discussed this with the other writers of The Review. It is not even a tacit understanding. It just happens that we all write that way. And that doesn't mean that we wouldn't include a blog among our offerings some day, if it seemed right.

Read the full message on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!



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