We Have a Newsletter! Please Sign Up, Darklings!

Did you know we have a newsletter? Yep, we do! One of the best (and easiest) ways to support what we do is subscribe to our newsletter. Right here: tinyletter.con/lunalunamagazine

In it, we send weekly article reads round-ups, links to work by people we know and love outside of Luna Luna, we extol our phenomenal writers and editors, and we share some personal ideas and feelings.

It's very important that the newsletter keeps an intimate feel. So, you know, you feel like you’re cuddling in bed with us. We wouldn't just want to link you to a bunch stuff and then be done with you, after all! We love you. 

Oh, and if you're a fan of Luna Luna and you want more of that good stuff, our editors have newsletters, too.

Lisa Marie Basile's newsletter is all rituals, writing, and mini interviews with wonderful people: tinyletter.com/lisamariebasile

Joanna Valente's newsletter is very literary and personal: tinyletter.com/jvalente

We'd love if you subscribed.

Luna Luna Spotlight: Monique Quintana

BY THE EDITORS OF LUNA LUNA

We here at Luna Luna love our contributors. We know how busy they are—running their own magazines, writing books, resisting the darkness in the world, and making all sorts of magic. That they come back to Luna Luna again and again to write and share and create is an honor, and there are no words to express our thanks. They are family to us, so we thought we'd spotlight them so you could learn more about who they are and what they do. Please support them! Read their articles, buy their books, subscribe to their blogs, and send kisses.

Monique Quintana

Tell us a little bit about what inspires you as a writer. 

I write because I feel compelled to do it. If I go too long without writing, I get anxious and I have a hard time sleeping. I was an extremely shy child, and I always felt more confident when I wrote things down. I always seem to articulate myself better that way. I always feel more powerful when I write as opposed to speaking.

I’ve been really inspired the writings of Wendy Ortiz, Myriam Gurba, Jennifer Givhan, and Laurie Ann Guerrero because they write about sex and death in joyful and grotesquely beautiful ways.

I’m mostly inspired to write by my friends, Jackie Huertaz, Steven Sanchez, and Jacob Hernandez, who got me through my painful/beautiful MFA experience and are still my point people. They’re the other three corners of my tiny coven and are all doing great things with their writing.

What projects/pieces are you working on (especially if it's not LL-related, so we can promote you).

I’m expanding my MFA thesis into a longer manuscript, tentatively titled, Chola Mona Lisa and Other Pieces. It’s a hybrid collection of interconnected Xicana gothic flash fiction, micro-fiction, short stories, and a novella. 

Which one of your LL pieces do you recommend people read right now?

I’d recommend reading my first Luna Luna piece, “Trash Glamour: A Manifesto,” because it gets at what I’m trying to do with my beauty, fashion, and wellness writing for the magazine. These things aren’t petty things, they’re rituals, they’re a part of our everyday lives. Individuals should find what makes them feel powerful and helps them to manifest their existence to the fullest. 

In this current political climate, I’m trying to find ways to politicize my spending. Time is energy, and money is energy. I’m not interested in telling individuals how to look good to appease other people or how to spend a ton of money to live up to a certain ideal that might not be conducive to their own experience. I love transformation and glamour, but it has to be done on my own terms. I adore Old Hollywood and a gothic aesthetic, but I’m not going to forfeit my feminism to try to fit into some kind of preconceived idea of what that means. As a woman of color, it is always going to mean something different for me. There are a lot of brown and black alt girls out there and I’m trying to make contact with them.

Vampires, witches, or ghosts—and why?

All three of these entities have been a resounding presence in my life and are connected in some way. Years ago, my father had a woman do a limpia blessing on his house when a ghost refused to leave, and I prayed many nights to be a vampire when I was a kid, because I wanted to live forever. I was really a witch. Ultimately, witching is my feminism. It makes me think of the women who came before me. It makes me think of my ancestors. It makes me think of a time before colonization. My great-grandmother helped women give birth on both sides of the Mexican border. One day, she left her husband, took back her maiden name, and went to live alone in a doll’s house with a pond and ducklings in the backyard. She was a curandera, and I am a witch, a bruja. They are different, but there are some commonalities. I still try to learn from her.

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Monique Quintana is the fashion editor for Luna Luna, and is the Editor-in-Chief of the literary blogazine, Razorhouse. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from CSU Fresno, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Huizache, Bordersenses, and The Acentos Review, among others. She is a Squaw Valley Writers Fellow and was the Senior Associate Fiction Editor for The Normal School. She has an affinity for Ray Bans, red lipstick, and Ramón Novarro. She is a Pocha/Chicana identified mother, daughter, sister, lover, and English teacher from central California.

Meet Our Editors: Nadia Gerassimenko

Nadia is one of our two dedicated assistant editors; simply put, Nadia is a ball of magic wrapped up into one lady. Not only is she brilliant, empathic and truly a great human being (like, literally, she's a magical fairy or something--we swear), she's been dedicated to Luna Luna for a long time now.

In her tenure with Luna Luna, she's copy-edited, written, edited, promoted and done the nitty-gritty work (like posting content), which--as any editor knows--is the most important, arguably. She keeps the whole ship moving, on a sea of glitter and stars. Really, she deserves all the pretty words and adjectives. 

We're SO lucky to have Nadia. Here's us screaming it from the rooftop. 

Nadia also runs the site Tepid Autumn, a beautiful coterie of her thoughts and work. She's also the author of Moonchild Dreams, which you should check out here.

Some her work is below:

INTERVIEW WITH LEZA CANTORAL ABOUT HER NOVELETTE PLANET MERMAID

WHICH LANA DEL REY SONG IS YOUR LIFE ANTHEM? HERE'S OURS

4 GRAPHIC NOVELS YOU SHOULD READ ON HALLOWEEN

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About Nadia: 

I like to call myself a Moonchild, poet-writer, lover of new wave and gothic rock music, horror movies and games aficionado. I was born in Almaty, Kazakhstan. However, most of my life I lived in Montreal, Canada with my parents and grandmother. And as of 2015, I had relocated to New Jersey as a permanent citizen. I studied Marketing in college and have recently incorporated the field into my everyday professional life although my main focus is still on editorial work.

Having been writing poetry and prose since I was 14 as a creative outlet, having stopped for a while, and having resumed the activity again in my mid-twenties, I realized that words impassion me and not exclusively in terms of writing words. I love reading words. I am also pedantic about proper grammar, and I enjoy the process of learning rules I'm not aware of or forgot about. I like to break them on occasion, too. Thus, I decided to give it a go...become a freelancing editor. So far the journey has been a challenging yet exhilarating and fulfilling experience. I hope to be a full-time editor some day, although, sometimes, it feels like I already am. 

On the side, I am also an assistant editor and staff writer for Luna Luna Magazine. It's a wonderful online journal with very talented, intelligent, and sweet people. We write about subjects that can make one feel uncomfortable for their unconventionality, that deliver out-of-the-box thinking, and that are on a darker, edgier side. We curate pieces by writers that are deeply personal and vulnerable. More importantly, we are an open and compassionate community. 

It's not easy for artists today (was it ever?), so I like to support new and indie artists I discover and am fond of by sharing some of their work, spreading the word about them, and offering guest posts on my site. Now and then I like to blurb about works of art that left a permanent imprint in me. If you'd like to be featured on my site, please contact me, I'm always happy to oblige.

Looking Forward: Luna Luna's Risky Relaunch & Our Plans For 2016

BY LISA MARIE BASILE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & CREATIVE DIRECTOR

On October 31, my staff and I relaunched Luna Luna Magazine. Actually, let me clarify: I forced a relaunch. Fed up with WordPress and its forever-glitchy plugins and crashing themes (we're a volunteer staff who operates late-night from our bedrooms, and we don't have a tech support team), I made the switch to Squarespace. I even bought a brand new URL (to hell with SEO! Just kidding, that's a huge pain point).

This overhaul wasn't conventional, at least not for a content-focused publication. But I wanted something beautiful, something that could create the magic reading experience we envisioned, and I wanted something that reflected our aesthetic. I also wanted that something to be easy for our team, since we're mainly updating on the go. Ah, such is the glamorous life of a niche internet magazine. There were plenty of others variables, and I won't pretend I knew everything, but I believe in big fucking risks that positively impact long-term sustainability.

I made a frightening decision to change our editorial focus and voice too. This is to say that I had push-back as well as major support. A lot of tense G-chat debates and in-person conversations. A lot of excellent points made all around. A lot of weighing clicks versus craft. A lot of wondering if Luna Luna Magazine was repetitive, redundant, messy, wonderful, necessary, unique or impactful.

Joanna (our managing editor and the one I've worked most closely with for the better part of a year+) wanted to ensure the magazine's success in practical ways: consistently publishing content, making sure our pageviews were growing. I too wanted that, but I struggled with the things that tended to make things clickable. I refused to let Luna Luna Magazine become yet another Click This Headline magazine. All things said, Joanna's eye for strong and shareable content has meshed beautifully with my stringent (aka relentlessly pushy) creative direction. (My boyfriend called me the 'witchy Anna Wintour', oh god.)

Intermission: No, for real, props to the Luna Luna Magazine team for being absolutely badass. 

Part of the risk of relaunching this October was in cutting a portion of the kind of content we published. We had started as an edgy, darker arts & culture magazine in the summer of 2013, but we slowly became a daily feminist touch-point. The majority of our content focused on women's rights and feminist first-person essays. I loved this, and meeting so many incredible women and writers did things for my life that for which I am endlessly indebted. Our pageviews skyrocketed.

However, I fell and felt deeply out of touch with our content. I wanted to keep writing about women, but reduce any one niche focus in order to do more of everything: art, culture, the original occult vertical, confession, intersectional content and even bad feminism. We don't want to be perfect; we're explorers. 

We were also publishing so much that I couldn't edit (9-5 jobs, am I right?). I couldn't work with my writers closely and I couldn't go through with a fine-tooth comb to find the voices and perspectives we hadn't published already. I felt that there needed to be a way for me to connect with my writers as much as our readers. After all, Luna Luna, as I envisioned it, was always a community for dialogue and opinion from the inside out. It was about creating a space for readers and writers to be friends, supporters and dreamers together. 

Maybe I'm an idealist. Maybe I'm lacking a sense of entrepreneurialism. But no. I've worked in rigid corporate content institutions, and I've worked at startups where growth at lightspeed (sacrificing quality) was the dominating factor. I've written for clickbait paychecks and I've written beautiful essays that will probably never be seen again. And time and again, I come back to that which makes me proud, makes me uncomfortable, makes me feel I've collected a menagerie of perfect words. 

Balancing that obsession with beauty and slow growth with the way the internet works is a struggle, I won't lie. After all, we want to be able to sell ad space on our new site. In my day job, I'm all SEO and headlines, but at Luna Luna, I can and will take the time to finesse it. 

Since we relaunched, our bounce rate reduced by over 50% - a beautiful thing. Our older site (lunalunamag.com) had more pageviews of course (three years' worth), but people were leaving. Was it the site design? The content? We don't know. Now people are sticking around. Our return visitor rate shows we're building a beautiful community. And our top-viewed articles show that our readers are still coming for the art and staying for the intimacy. This is an area we'll continuously work on.

We have a long way to go. We have to pay our contributors. We have to build a more diverse editorial staff. We have to develop our regional focus (starting with NYC), and we have to do community work. We want to work with organizations, host readings, host speaking series, and throw networking parties. We want to grow sponsorship relationships and make a difference for people on and off the site. This takes time, money, discipline and vision, and we definitely have two of those things. You guess which. 

Our goal is to fundraise for our writers this year, to say thank you, to sell ad spots, to steadily publish beautiful content that is unique and sometimes imperfect, to balance the light and the dark. We aim to balance the markers of actual real world site growth with a continued focus on selectivity and calculated aesthetic development. Those secrets we will keep, but we hope you'll come along. 

And so, I leave you with some of our most popular content pieces as we ended 2015:

13 Aesthetically Beautiful Literary Journals To Submit To & Read

This Is Why My Love Life Has Always Failed

Seeking Arrangement: On My Brief & Failed Attempt at Becoming a Sugar Baby

Stop Saying "I Have A Boyfriend"

James Deen & The Crisis of Media-Appointed Feminist Heroes

40 Books Published in 2015 That Should Be on Your Shelf

A Catalogue of Scars

A Conversation With Poet Megan Falley About Lana Del Rey

Why I Stopped Shaving All of My Body Hair