Foreword
It is thought that relative time actually moves faster as we age. When you’re young, it crawls at an agonizing pace, dreams of future freedoms and excitement making seconds stand still. As you age, time becomes a bullet train hurtling through the scenery of your life. The blur of days becomes months as you’re whisked from one life event to another. The newness of passing experiences is fleeting.
It seems like just yesterday we here at Samjoko were excited about the Spring Issue III being profiled in The Korea Times. Now, on this rocking train of time barreling from one stop to another, we find ourselves racing to put together the current Summer Issue III 2024 of the magazine.
We’ve been busy leading up to this release day. Though we wish we could say that Samjoko is our primary focus, we have tasks off the page of this particular publishing narrative which takes us away from reading the hundreds of submissions we receive every season. Trying to choose the pieces we feel best fit our aesthetic from the slush pile is mental exercise we enjoy, but the process acts as a tailwind to the train, consuming time and distance so fast that we almost arrive to our destination before we realize it.
Despite it all, we have finally compiled the latest issue of Samjoko right before the deadline. We are proud to present five poets and four fiction writers for our readers to enjoy. As usual, we would like to encourage everyone who visits the magazine to consider supporting us on Patreon or Buying Us Coffee. If a small fraction of the traffic to our magazine supported us with $3 a month for six months of the year (which would equal a whopping $18 for each person), it would help encourage us and allay some of the costs to running a paying market for thirty-six months now.
Because in the end, by helping us, you also help creatives seeking additional avenues to display their work to a wider audience. In this increasingly artificial landscape, showcasing writing produced by natural means is a form of paying it forward. It is easy to imagine the next generation starving for the raw brilliance of genuine human creativity. The gleam of artificial intelligence may be seductive, but it’s also off-putting in its digital sterilization of the human spirit.
Why we’re in a rush to neutralize the humanity in art is a mystery to us, but here at Samjoko, we’ll strive to remain a bulwark against the suffocation of originality.
Welcome to the Summer Issue III 2024 of Samjoko Magazine.
