Welcome, Phil Spotswood and J. Bowers!
William & Alison
This past month, we were humbled to receive a number of passionate, impressive applications to join the Cartridge Lit team. Now, we’re excited to announce the journal’s two newest editors: Phil Spotswood and J. Bowers. Both of them have demonstrated a wealth of knowledge and experience in both the literary and gaming spheres, and they come as welcome additions that will invaluably help to grow and improve our little journal.
We’d like to give the new editors a chance to say hello in their own words. First, here’s a greeting from Phil:
Hi folks! I’m absolutely thrilled to be joining Will, Alison, and Jess on the Cartridge Lit crew. With indie games flourishing, there can never be enough artists exploring these virtual worlds and the creative potential within them. I’m excited to help provide a platform for that.
I haven’t stopped playing Darkest Dungeon since its release last year. Though brutal, it has moments of hope: Alone in the woods or tunnels, survival is the same. Prepare, persist, and overcome. I’m looking forward to reading your take on video games that help us think and act through our toughest moments. Or, more succinctly in the words of Shovel Knight: Steel thy shovel!
And, on a slightly more formal note, here’s Phil’s bio:
Phil Spotswood is an MFA Poetry candidate at LSU, where he also serves as the managing editor of New Delta Review. His work can be found in TAGVVERK, Hobart, Heavy Feather Review, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. He tweets @queermicrobiome.
Next, here’s an introductory note from J. Bowers:
Greetings, Cartridge literati. I love this journal and am excited to support it in a more official capacity. I grew up playing Dig-Dug and Frogger at my chainsmoking grandma’s knee, but I’ve rarely met a turn-based RPG I didn’t like. I fixate on weird things about games, like Taloon’s wife giving him Lunch each day in Dragon Quest IV, which you can heartlessly make her sell in the family item shop for 7G. I believe Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist is criminally underrated. I wonder how long the potato chips in Rapture have been there. I love video game history, half-remembered DOS abandonware, and urban legends about hypnotic arcade cabinets. Would you kindly send me work that takes on a point-of-view other than a game’s player or protagonist, and/or anything else wild and wonderful you come up with?
And finally, here’s her bio:
J. Bowers is a fiction writer based out of St. Louis, Missouri, where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Maryville University. Her short stories have appeared in The Indiana Review, StoryQuarterly, Redivider, The Portland Review, and other journals, in addition to being anthologized by Ashland Creek Press, Sundress Publications, and Zoomorphic. A gamer for as long as she can remember, some of her earliest memories involve the family Atari 2600, Colecovision, and TI-99/4A. Her favorite video game series include Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Monkey Island, King’s Quest, Quest for Glory, all Bioware RPGs, Harvest Moon, Earthbound, and the Sims franchise. When not writing, teaching, or playing video games, she can be found riding her horse.
Now that you know who they are, why don’t you give them something to read? Hop over to our submission guidelines and send us your video game lit. And again, congratulations and welcome aboard to our two new party members!