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Michael Wutz

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Russell Burrows
Kathryn L. MacKay
Victoria Ramirez
Brad L. Roghaar

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Published by the College of Arts and Humanities at  Weber State University

Dear past, present, and future contributor to Weber—The Contemporary West,

        I write to give you an update on the future of our journal and the future of our submission process and honoraria payments. 
       As you are no doubt aware, the global downturn of the economy has left deep scars on state budgets across the United States, which in turn have severely affected funding for higher education.  Weber State University was hit with a double-digit retrospective budget adjustment for the 2008-09 academic year and is projected to face similar downward corrections in the years to come.  WSU’s College of Arts & Humanities as the primary sponsor of Weber—The Contemporary West was required to make corresponding budget adjustments, which have already had, and will continue to have, a lasting and immediate effect on the journal.
       Chief among those adjustments is that our long-standing Managing Editor, Kay Anderson—the administrative pivot of the journal—will leave Weber by 15 May, so that the journal will be without ongoing daily staff support from then on.  Let me publicly say thank you to Kay for her years of extraordinary service and dedication, combined with the best wishes for the future. Given Kay’s qualifications and employment history, I am very hopeful that she will find some rewarding employment soon.
       In addition to the loss of our key office person, the journal has also lost much of its annual funding for daily operations, printing and mailing, as well as the payment of author honoraria.  What that means in concrete terms is that we will have to scale down our current publication cycle of three issues a year to one issue in 2010 and 2011 each, and that rhythm may likely continue into 2012 until funding is restored sometime in the future.  Much as we regret this reduced publishing schedule, we want to thank Dr. Madonne Miner, the Dean of the College of Arts & Humanities, for her foresight in not shutting down the journal altogether, when numerous legitimate venues are competing for ever diminishing resources. The journal has already written several grant proposals to seek outside support, which might possibly allow us to publish more than one issue a year, but our current plans call for one issue a year only.
       With that in mind, I want to ask our contributors (past, present, and future) not to submit any additional/future work for consideration for the time being.  Since we had been working as a full-blown operation until very recently, we have, in the interest of strategic planning, built up a sizable backlog of excellent work, and this backlog was fueled further by a substantial increase in our annual submissions.  We are, therefore, not able review or accept any work for the remainder of this year and a good part of 2010—and maybe even beyond—but want to publish the work we have already accepted instead.  Possibly, we might re-open our submission process briefly in summer of 2010 (1 June to 30 August), not the least because such a limited time window would make the review process more manageable for us. We do, however, want to urge you to please check our website for review details in the future.  We very much appreciate that and want to ask for your understanding in advance in not being able to return manuscripts and/or respond to inquiries.
       For the same reason, we will no longer be able to make honoraria payments to our contributors, which has long been part of the journal’s practice and philosophy. Believing that good art should receive at least a token payment, we have—much in contrast to many other journals—gone out of our way to generate funds for that specific purpose (and should a funding agency restrict its support to honoraria in the future, we will of course gladly honor that commitment and disperse such monies accordingly).  Given the current economic crisis and the more immediate needs of the journal, however, we feel that both Weber and our contributors are better served by keeping the journal in print, if only on a smaller scale.
       Let me, in closing, please reiterate our continued dedication to making Weber a viable and important part of the U.S. publishing culture and our commitment to you as authors, poets, and artists.  I hope we can count on your understanding in these trying times and look forward—in the future—to the privilege of featuring your work (again). 

With best wishes from all of us at Weber—