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New Lit on the Block :: Crab Fat Literary Magazine

Rounding out its first year of publication, Crab Fat Literary Magazine has four print issues (August, November, February, May) and a ‘best of’ anthology in addition to its online collection from posting new writing every other Sunday of the year.

Founding/Managing Editor Caseyrenée Lopez and Fiction Editor Ella Ann Weaver oversee the publication of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, flash fiction, interviews, art/photography, and experimental/hybrid work. They will consider audio/video of readings, but it’s not something they’ve published regularly.

The motivation for starting CFLM, Caseyrenée tells me, was “to join the conversation. My educational background is focused on queer writing/publishing, and supporting minority voices was the next step for me. I also wanted to see what was out there; starting Crab Fat has provided me with interactions and experience I wouldn’t have gained otherwise.”

Most intriguing to me is that name – Crab Fat. Where on earth did that come from? Caseyrenée says, “I wanted something memorable and cool, but was struggling to find something that would vibe with my goal of highlighting awkward/experimental/queer prose and poetry. A few days before I committed to buying a domain, my husband and I were at breakfast and started calling out random phrases and obscure words. He suggested ‘crab fat’ because we’d been listening to Crudbump‘s Illuminati Shit. Our favorite line in the song is ‘rock a big gut, that’s my crab fat’ and we’d been making jokes about his chubby belly being ‘crab fat.’ So really, the name Crab Fat is a weird mashup of rap lyrics and body positivity.”

In keeping with the unique name, readers can expect to find “a little bit of this and a little bit of that,” Caseyrenée tells me. “We feature a wide variety of voices and offer an eclectic mix of contemporary content. We are progressive and like to publish work that goes against the grain of mainstream.” To that end, during their first year CFLM has featured writing from Adam Kuta, Edward A. Boyle, D.S. West, Haley Fedor, Alana I. Capria, Philicia Montgomery, and Susannah Betts.

The future for CFLM will include pushing the genre limits and incorporating more experimental work into the magazine. “We want work that breaks conventions and makes us question what we know about genre” says Caseyrenée, “so we are actively reaching out to a wider audience than before. We are also trying to raise money through tip-jar submissions, a GoFundMe campaign, a cool image prompt contest, and sales of our print anthology. We want to pay writers for their work, even if it is just a token payment, to show that we appreciate all of their hard work.” Crab Fat also actively works to recognize writers through nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

CFLM’s print anthology is published under the Damaged Goods Press imprint. Caseyrenée is the founder of both, so in a sense, they’re sister sites/publications. The quarterly magazine is available as PDF and print, and the every other Sunday installments on available online. Submissions are accepted a rolling basis using Submittable.

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