PEARL MAGAZINE's 40th issue released

Pearl is an acclaimed, Southern California-based literary magazine with a long and colorful history. It was founded by Joan Jobe Smith in 1974 as an all-female publication funded by the Cal State Long Beach Honors Program. Charles Buckowski, then unbiquitous in small press magazines, was so annoyed about being excluded on the basis of his gender that he apparently considered submitting some poetry under a female pseudonym. Buckowski was slated to appear in a "male chauvanist pig" issue (this was the '70s, remember,) but Pearl ran out of cash after its third issue and folded in 1975.

Twelve years passed before Pearl was reborn in 1987, this time as a privately-funded, co-ed magazine that Smith co-edited with former Pearl contributor Marilyn Johnson and poet Barbara Hauk. It's been going strong ever since, with notable contributors including Buckowski (at last,) Frank X. Gaspar, Robert Peters, Ed Ochester and Ada Limon, whose poem Crush appears in the current issue of The New Yorker.

The 40th issue of Pearl is now available, and it's a densely-packed 136 pages highlighted by Erin Campbell's 2008 Pearl Short Story Prize winner Stolen Things, and Barstow Bones, a story by my father, John Stacy. Barstow Bones is a terrifyingly vivid tale of WWII-era racial tensions, following a young Japanese American on a trip through a desert town on his way to join the Navy in Los Angeles. The story looks at 1940s America from the perspective of an average young American - a fan of swing music and Charlie Chan movies - who suddenly finds himself regarded as a dangerous outsider in his own country. Maybe I'm a tad biased, but I see big things ahead for this Stacy fellow.

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