This week I have a very special Feminist Fiction Friday, an interview with Jennifer Parsons, the founding editor of
Luna Station Quarterly.
Here's how she describes herself: A highly-skilled pixel slinger and code monkey by trade, Jennifer writes speculative fiction and fairy tales because she loves stories, reads books as part of the Geek Girls Book Club, devours comic books because she's loved Batman her entire life, writes essays and reviews for The Loser’s Table, and edits the literary magazine Luna Station Quarterly because she believes women write awesome stories. When not doing those things, she makes things from yarn, cuddles her kitties, and goes on sporadic bouts of television watching and gourmet cooking. She's been known to swing a Wii controller like a Jedi. Sometimes, she sleeps.
This is what she had to say:
Kattomic: I love the look of the Luna Station Quarterly site, especially the colors. Who designed it? (I know you did, because I read the fine print, but I’m in awe of people who can do their own sites and/or book covers or whatever.)
JP: This is where being a professional web designer comes in handy. I do all of my own design and development work (LSQ is built on Drupal), so thank you, I’ll take all credit. LOL. The color scheme came about because the last thing I wanted on a women-authored fiction site is any hint of cliched pink. I wanted something that invoked a retro feel, a reminder of the wonder Sci-Fi authors of the past had for the future. Some call it Retro-futurism, that nostalgia for the future that has yet to come about. I didn’t want it to feel too masculine either, so the little stars and planets reflect that bit of whimsy that I often find in female-written spec-fic.
Kattomic: This is the third year of publication for LSQ, right? Any plans for expansion—more issues per year? Print publication?
JP: Oh, the plans that are in my brain! I want to expand LSQ, though what form that will take is up in the air. I want to keep the quarterly magazine as a quarterly, but I’ve had ideas since LSQ’s inception for ways to increase our output. As submission numbers grow, I’m asking myself this question more and more often, with a print anthology foremost in that thought process. Would you like me to be more vague? LOL.
Actually, my first priority before adding other editions or offshoots, is to find a way to pay my authors. Right now, web hosting costs come out of my own pocket and my personal finances don’t allow for much more than that. I’m incredibly hesitant to put ads on the site as I feel that it would be a distraction and possibly make it appear that I’m looking to monetize the site, which I’m not. I’m considering a donation button, but I have yet to make a firm decision. LSQ has never been about money for me. In fact, it’s never been about me at all, which is why I never publish any of my own stories.
David Ulin is a writer, a book critic and an editor. He edited one of my favorite books about Los Angeles, Writing Los Angeles, which brings together writers as disparate as Chester Himes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Christopher Isherwood. (And of course, Raymond Chandler.) The book has an elegant cover too, clean and graphically simple and yet evocative. 
