Ramon Stoppelenburg is a Dutch journalist, translator, business strategy consultant, former world traveler and founder of The Quiet Reader.
It was in the spring of 2020 that the idea sprouted for a new international literary magazine. I was sitting in a comfortable extended window frame of an old colonial villa in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, my home for the last 10 years, while reading an e-book. Or staring outside. Or reading again. It was so quiet everywhere.
The state of spring 2020 was that of a worldwide pandemic outbreak. A coronavirus traveled worldwide and was testing humanity in staying indoors, on lockdown, in quarantine or on high alert once outside. Even though my location didn’t have anything but the advice of outdoor mask-wearing, which pretty much everybody in Asia already does for years (unless you enjoy the horrible fumes in traffic) and frequent hand-washing, it was quite a change of life. Schools had closed and a lot of my foreign expatriate friends had left on the last flights out, back to their presumable safer home countries.
I ran a small art house movie theater in the capital city and survived on offering private movie sessions for small groups that found it safe to be out together. The movie theater became an important escape haven for those with little to do. During the day I would read a lot and work on my own writing.
In a corner was a printed copy of a Dutch literary magazine; literature from my home country. It was quite popular and successful and I loved the contents, but it had ceased to exist after two years. Online, there were a few literary magazines to be found. Mostly published by universities, or big time review sites that would publish anything including current rants against American politics in lengthy essays, next to non-fiction exploits about parenting in quarantine and fictional short stories that were, in the end, hard to find.
With my background in writing and publishing I decided to take matters in my own hands and just launch a new online literary magazine. Looking at anything from all over the world, looking for fiction and non-fiction stories that matter and take me somewhere else, while I would read them wherever I would be. What do you do when you read? You are silent, you are quiet, you are submerged into the pleasure the authors present to you. And The Quiet Reader was born.
I gathered some of my international published writing friends, those who have published books or have a lifetime of experience in the writing and publishing industry and those who are avid and critical readers of pretty much anything they can get their hands on – and invited them to join me.
And here I must apologize to them. We received over 160 submissions, varying from a few hundred to over 7,000 words per story, but hugely differing in style and quality. We read every submission. We commented on them all and rated every story. I gave my team a hard time in a dusty gold mine. We were reading thousands and thousands of undisciplined, poorly written, rambling words with some ill-constructed stories to get to only a few nuggets of gold.
This reminded me of the Phnom Penh International Film Festival I had organized myself a few years ago. I ran a movie theater, so why not accept submissions from all over the world by filmmakers who want to submit their movie to an international film festival in Cambodia? And submission was open and free, as I wasn’t planning on an award ceremony or inviting the film makers over with Q&A’s with their movie screening. My theater seated a comfy 32 people max. I got overwhelmed with over 300 submitted films in less than 2 months. To make the selection easier, I invited over my local movie lovers and put them in the movie room for a few afternoons a week. I almost lost a few friends there and witnessed them screaming Nooooooo when something horribly experimental had started on the screen. Or a lengthy movie had started where the cinematography was off the charts, the acting really bad and the story… well… didn’t exist in the end. Some of my judges would storm out of the movie room and demand a stiff drink before continuing.
This happened at a micro level in our mailbox, full of submissions of stories by authors from all over the world. Somehow my few tweets on Twitter and on some Facebook groups about a new magazine opening up for submissions, made people send in their works or even write something specifically for our magazine.
Behind the scenes we go through everything and read every story. There were a lot of stories by people who can write well, but the story just wasn’t there. Or the genre was off. Or the structure rambled. To quote the British comedian Bill Bailey, after a suggestion from the audience did not led to a joke: “It was a long and windy road along the beach, only to find out the café was closed.” That covers a lot of the entries we have received. Not that they were not promising. We got in contact with quite a group of really good writers.
And we learned a lot as a little team of readers and editors. That we would need more time, next time. That we will have a group of preliminary Staff Readers and an Editorial Team for the finer selection.
But we found the nuggets. We have hereby selected ten stories that we present you as pieces of polished gold, true finds of great enticing writing, superbly executed ideas, intriguing stories and beautiful, heartfelt dialogues. We found emotions, intrigue, suspense, thrills, history and exposures.
With this first edition of The Quiet Reader we launch these literary discoveries into the online world for all to enjoy and with a website designed for proper reading perspective, even on your mobile devices. Take your time while reading, as every story is different, and applaud the authors who wrote them.
Share your favorites on social media and support the authors, and help spread their great works. Let’s keep them encouraged to keep on writing and perhaps open the eyes of agents and publishers that see bigger works by them.
Are you a writer? Let us know and we will see what the future brings us.
Ramon Stoppelenburg
Editor-in-chief