The Lodestone Review started out as a hypothetical idea for an essay I wrote in my first Literary Editing class in college. The assignment was to discuss in detail what we saw as a primary problem facing literary publishing today, then propose a new “literary venture” that would address that problem. My idea was to propose a literary journal that reviews and promotes books written by emerging authors from small and independent presses struggling to build an audience.
I got the name “Lodestone” from, weirdly enough, a supplemental in-universe booklet made by the avant-garde art attraction Meow Wolf for their Denver installation, Convergence Station. The booklet in question is the Tome of Forgetting, and ties in to one of the four fictional converging worlds that form Convergence Station’s wild and wacky multiverse. To make a long story short, they used the word “lodestone” at one point in the booklet, and ever since I read it, this word has been spinning around my head the way certain words often do (I once couldn’t stop thinking about the word “horticulture” for some reason). The most common definition of the word “lodestone” is a piece of magnetite or other naturally magnetized mineral, able to be used as a magnet. But it has another meaning: a thing that is the focus of attention or attraction.
I’ve always been drawn to words with double meanings, especially when one of them is tied to nature. For example, the word “ingress” means the action or fact of going in or entering, but it also means the arrival of the sun, moon, or a planet in a specified constellation or part of the sky. The reason why lodestone stayed with me was because of the way it sounded in my mind, on my tongue; it felt like poetry, a word that rhymed itself and thus bounced around the walls of my head like an echo. You don’t often come across words like that. I knew that it would stand out, if for no other reason than to make people say “what on earth does that mean?” But now that I’ve had time to muse about it a little more, I realize that this word’s double meaning connects perfectly to what I wanted the purpose of this journal to be. A place where I share things that interest and inspire me, and hold them under a gentle focusing lens for people to look through and gain a new perspective.
And if, after reading a few of my posts, you start to feel your own mind tingle and vibrate with excitement at the nearness of certain things that inspire you, especially if those things have a polar energy that is the opposite of what you thought you’d be attracted to, well…
I’d say it’s done its job.
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