OPEN FILE 01

The establishment is dead. Please hold while we check its inbox.

PRESS FOR REASSURANCE

Too late. You are already reading Broken Zine.

At 2:17 a.m. Monday, local writer Gideon Vale interrupted his six-page denunciation of literary gatekeeping to refresh the submissions portal of a magazine that had not responded to him in 87 days.

“Approval is a narcotic,” Vale said, opening the tab again. “I have removed myself from their ridiculous system.” The system continued to list his poem as In Progress.

Vale, who describes himself as an unclassifiable voice from outside the institutions, maintains a spreadsheet of 63 institutions that have not yet classified his voice. Columns include response time, acceptance rate, moral cowardice, and whether the editors have followed him back.

His forthcoming manifesto, Why I Refuse to Seek Permission, is currently under consideration at four prestigious journals. One charges a reading fee. Vale paid it twice after the first transaction appeared to time out.

“They don’t understand the work,” he said of editors who have not read the work. “This is why I need them to read it.”

Friends report that he has stopped checking his email and now checks only the portal, his spam folder, the journal’s Instagram account, the editors’ personal websites, and a private spreadsheet of people who were accepted instead.

At press time Vale had revised his manifesto’s author bio to include the phrase “forthcoming in” followed by a blank space.

He insisted this was not optimism. It was typesetting.

Ruby Morrow reports from the narrow strip of pavement between public relations and complete social collapse.

Push something. The magazine is poorly supervised.

PUSH THE WEIRD BUTTON

A small bureaucrat somewhere just stamped APPROVED FOR NONSENSE.