by Harold McMillan

Happy New Year!

Thank God, and you all. We made it to another new year. Still alive, still healthy (pretty much), and still outthere on the street thinking cultural thoughts and trying our damnedest to be arty. If you noticed, this number is the first o there on the street thinking cultural thoughts and trying our damnedest to be arty. If you noticed, this number is the first one of volume seven. And being someone who is pretty bah-humbug about birthdays and holidays, it's important for me to note just how thankful and blessed I feel to be doing my little column here at the start of year seven. Just this, the fact that you are reading this right now, makes me very proud and thankful. The odds were very much against us making it through our first year. But damn, lookie here, here we go again. Happy Volume 7 to us!

Thank you for picking us up, again or for the first time. A personal thanks from me to my original and early cohorts Chris Hess, Sandra Beckmeier, Carl Marshall, and Marlo Bennett for believing in the notion, and having a level of stick-to-it-ness that got us here. And thank you to Luke and Pat at Ruby's BBQ who have advertised in every issue that I can remember. The support and good work of our printer, Highland Press, has been essential to our effort to actually produce a good looking product. My thanks also go to a lot of other here unnamed businesses, individuals and contributors, too many to list. My thanks go to the new crop of "little magazine" devotees and worker bees, too. But the folks this debt of gratitude. I mention my friends and collaborators here, again, because they are the reason that we now are able to enter our seventh year of publication. For me it's personal. But if you like what we have tried to do with this little mag, you too owe these folks some thanks. Their sweat equity is pretty smelly here, on every page...Damn, I know das rite! I can smell Chris' disapproval right now. He hate it when I talk/write like this.

I was thinking that this should be the friction issue. You know, a whole issue devoted to things and people that rub us the wrong way. I could really sink my teeth into that for a topic. Maybe we'll do that one another time. This time, however, my friends here at Austin Downtown Arts did what they tend to do at least one time each year: they wanted an entire issue that is about us and our writing. No psuedo-journalistic reportage in this one. Just self indulgent prose and poetry. In the past we have done this for the December issue, but we've got new blood here and they wanted to move it to January. I'm cool wid dat. And I hope you find something here that you too think is Your comments, compliments, and criticism are welcome at mag@diversearts.org.