Regular readers of this magazine (and I need to believe that such people do exist) may be surpised to be reading an editorial. Up until now The Stinging Fly has functioned without one. When Aoife Kavanagh and I were putting together the first issue in 1998 we decided that there was nothing we needed to say. Rightly or wrongly, we believed that the material selected for publication was well able to speak for itself; the writers had done their work and did not need our words of advocacy or intervention. This belief has not faltered.

The main motivation behind The Stinging Fly is to provide an outlet for new Irish and international writing. Right from the beginning, after the first calls for submissions went out, the bundles of stuffed envelopes I picked up every week at the post office on James's Street provided ample proof that there was no shortage of writers out there who needed an outlet for their work. Over the two years since our first issue we have published poetry and short stories by well over a hundred authors, and this has included first-timers, writers said to be emerging, and ones with international reputations already established. The work selected has had one thing in common: I (or in the case of the first two issues, we) think it is good. Which means I've enjoyed reading it and I wanted other people to have a chance to read it too. The selection process is entirely, inescapably, subjective. If other people enjoy reading the magazine, then maybe I'm right, maybe the work is good. And maybe we're all wrong.

With this issue I had help reading submissions. Aoife, Maria and Gerry were given a share of the manuscripts to read and they reported back on what they liked and what they didn't. The process remains subjective.

John Boland, writing last year in The Irish Times, said literary magazines tended to be 'run by daft optimists rather than by commercial realists'. The commercial reality for The Stinging Fly is as follows: we continue to scrape by; we eventually cover our printing costs; we do not have the money to pay our writers or photographers, our illustrators or designers; we need to sell more copies; we need more grants, more sponsors, more advertisers and more patrons. Commercial reality tends to shut literary magazines down. But we're still around and the stuffed envelopes are still coming in. To continue to do what we do, we can't afford to be anything but daftly and wildly optimistic.

Declan Meade
Editor