Just as the Web was starting up, I started an online literary magazine (ezine) called eSCENE, which served as an online equivalent to Best American Short Stories. I asked for other ezine editors to submit the top 10 percent of the stories they published during the year; I contacted the authors asking permission to review the stories; and then, with the help of a guest editor and assistant editor, we published the best. I released three volumes of eSCENE, which I’m enormously proud of.
eSCENE was also featured in the introduction to the 1997 edition of Best American Short Stories, which inspired a writeup in The Atlantic which wrote, “At three years old eSCENE is already an online veteran: smart, handsome, and cleverly designed, it moves with the clarity and confidence of an established publication.”
Pretty soon after, I started my life as a freelance writer and editor, and suddenly found myself without a lot of free time. Especially in the early days, I was working absurdly long hours just to stay afloat. Unfortunately, one side effect was that I couldn’t keep up with eSCENE, and so the 1997 edition is the last one published.
The folks at Web del Sol took the idea and name (with my blessing) and continued the project for a while. Eventually, I let the original URL, escene.org, lapse and it was picked up by some other company. (It’s available again, but for $600.)
So, for the time being, eSCENE can now be found via the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. I’m working to relocate it to a more permanent URL, because I think eSCENE is a small, but important, piece of Internet history. If you like short fiction, I encourage you to go read the stories (and check out the then-cutting-edge Web design!).
Jeff Carlson | Never Enough Coffee Creations 