What is it with pears?. We’re happy to announce that two Orchid authors have new books recently published. The Prisoner Pea‌r by Elissa Minor Rust is now available. This outstanding collection of stories includes “Iris and Megan Imagine Alternatives” which first appeared in issue five of Orchid. The collection is published by Swallow Press and we highly recommend going out to your local bookseller to get your copy. Another great new book is Nothing in the World a novella by Roy Kesey. You can check out info about this book at http://nothingintheworld.com. We don’t know what it is but both books have pears on the cover. See our PIN UPS page for pictures of both books.

SPECIAL NOTE—Okay, here it is. As you may know, Orchid is done for love not money meaning it’s an full-time job for which we are not paid. We have real jobs, we have families, we have many other duties and responsibilities. It’s just so happens that one of those responsibilities has reached a crisis point in the last day or two requiring urgent and immediate attention on our part. We can only report that it involves critical financial considerations and a mistaken cash advance that resulted in an unintentional default. We’re currently absorbed in correcting this loan issue as it is impacting much more than our pocketbooks. If you every take out a short term loan, be sure you understand the repayment terms BEFORE you get the money. We took out essentially a payday loan and missed a couple of payments, and now we need to devote some effort into getting this right. If the urgent attention is not given, some things that are very important to us will implode and it won’t be pretty. In fact, it’s already pretty ugly but that’s a long story that we’ll tell another time (maybe). Anyway, this means the info previously posted below (Backlog Blues) is even more true. We will still be sorting through contest entries but we’ll be finished and sharing the results later than we had hoped. We’ll still be reading submissions but not at our usual pace. For practical purposes we’ll be suspending regular work on Orchid for the next two to four weeks. Let me emphasize: WE ARE NOT DEAD. Orchid #7 is more than 50% complete wiith much fine work, including stories by contest winnters, C. Abe Gaustad and J. D. Blair, and other fiction by Anne Campisi, Bill Capossere, Nancy Graham, Stephanie Harrison, Elizabeth Koch, Tao Lin, Suzanne McConnell and David Poissant.

There will be a bunch more information to follow oin the pages to follow & we will try to continue to update the information as more current information is released as well.