Editors' Note

2017's been a bit of a bumper year for this website.

We ran our first short story competition; put together a special "election" issue, on top of two regular issues; and started being listed on Duotrope, an established subscription-based database for writers and artists. We also hired our first intern and are on the lookout for volunteers to join us in literary shenanigans. In the final weeks of the year, we are planning our free WAAW Writing Workshop, kindly hosted by Sing Lit Station, on January 13, 2018 (details ) - the first in what will hopefully become a sustainable series.

Issue 8 caps off this fruitful year. Built around a mood, a feeling, rather than a clear theme like "election", 8 is the muted atmosphere of a wet afternoon, slick with reflection and unpredictable: the dark lake and teahouse shrouded in miasmal mist in Ian C Smith's poem, the raccoon-filled moon-lit nights, mouth-sewn-shut quiet and jazz echoes in Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois' work, and the vanitas still-life painting evoked in Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr.'s verse.

There is stillness, quiet, aimlessness, discontent and fear - fear of mortality, of wasting time - in the prose poems of Kyle Hemmings and Marcus Ong, too. The former, charting a neighbourhood and the lives it contained, "In the Shade of Weeping Willows"; the latter, detailing step-by-step the tedium of a woman's life, in "The Feeling I Get".

Nolcha Fox's epistolary (e-mail-ory?) story pierces the monsoon gloom a little, with its 'he said, she said' playfulness and wry look at power dynamics in a marriage. We are in love, too, with Jim Zola's paintings, the way they turn strokes and squiggles into the grain of wood, a face, light slicing at an angle the window of a cabin. Bonus upon bonus, then, that he sent them to us with poems that are both tonal and formal experiments, gleefully invoking the inspiration of monkeys at typewriters, a mad genius with an alphabet copy book.

See you in 2018.